Across corporate media, journalists and pundits introduced conspiracy theories to discredit the pro-Palestine student protest movement, particularly that they are funded by foreign countries or “outside agitators.”
Joe Scarborough and Hillary Clinton on MSNBC‘s Morning Joe (5/9/24) to talk about “misinformation,” agreeing that student protesters are “extremists…funded by Qatar.”
MSNBC‘s Joe Scarborough (5/9/24) went on a rant about the college students who have been staging the protests, suggesting to guest Hillary Clinton that they were influenced by China or Qatar:
I’m going to talk about radicalism on college campuses. The sort of radicalism that has mainstream students getting propaganda, whether it’s from their professors or whether it’s from Communist Chinese government through TikTok, calling the president of the United States “Genocide Joe.” Calling you and President Clinton war criminals.
Eventually, he called the students “extremists—I’m sorry—funded by Qatar.”
Clinton responded: “You raised things that need to be vented about.”
Scarborough’s claim that Qatar funds the students likely comes from a Jerusalem Post article (4/30/24), which called the protests “despicable.” The story reported, “Qatar has invested $5.6 billion in 81 American universities since 2007, including the most prestigious ones: Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Stanford.” Of course, funding universities is not the same as funding student protests; the university administrations that actually received the Qatari funding have often been quite hostile to the protesters.
‘Mr. Putin’s message’
Nancy Pelosi, interviewed by Dana Bash on CNN (1/28/24), accused protesters of being “connected to Russia” because “to call for a ceasefire is Mr. Putin’s message.”
House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) suggested on CNN’s State of the Union (1/28/24) that Russia has played a role in the protests:
And what we have to do is try to stop the suffering and gossip….. But for them to call for a ceasefire is Mr. Putin’s message…. I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some I think are connected to Russia.
CNN’s Dana Bash asked, “you think some of these protests are Russian plants?” Pelosi responded: “I don’t think they’re plants; I think some financing should be investigated.”
Like MSNBC, Fox News (5/2/24) has also pushed the narrative suggesting that China is behind the protests: “China may be playing a significant role in the anti-Israel protests by using TikTok to foment division on college campuses,” Alicia Warren wrote.
Gordon Chang, a senior fellow at the far-right, anti-Muslim Gatestone Institute, told Fox that “China is using the curation algorithm of TikTok to instigate protests.”
The presence of pro-Palestinian advocacy on TikTok has been cited by lawmakers as a justification for censoring the social media platform (FAIR.org, 5/8/24). But the messages on TikTok, which is popular among younger people, may simply reflect public opinion among that demographic. According to the Pew Research Center, “Younger adults are much less supportive of the US providing military aid to Israel than are older people.”
In a story headlined, “Campus Protests Give Russia, China and Iran Fuel to Exploit US Divide,” the New York Times (5/2/24) described “overt and covert efforts by the countries to amplify the protests.” The story included some speculation about foreign influence: “There is little evidence—at least so far—that the countries have provided material or organizational support to the protests,” Steven Lee Myers and Tiffany Hsu wrote. If there was any evidence, they did not present it.
The journalists blamed the protests for having “allowed” these “foreign influence campaigns…to shift their propaganda to focus on the Biden administration’s strong support for Israel.”
‘Professional outside agitators’
ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt on CNN (4/29/24): “There’s no rule that says the school needs to tolerate students or, again, outside activists dressing like they’re in Al Qaeda.”
Beyond foreign influence, another conspiracy theory pushed by corporate media about student protesters is that they are influenced by “outside agitators.” While people who are not students have joined the protests, the term has long been used to delegitimize movements and portray them as led by nefarious actors.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams was an early source of this claim, announcing at a press conference (4/30/24) that Columbia students have “been co-opted by professional outside agitators.” He made a similar statement in mid-April as well (4/21/24).
On MSNBC (5/1/24), NYPD deputy police commissioner Kaz Daughtry defended the claim, holding up a bicycle lock with a substantial metal chain that police had found at Columbia. “This is not what students bring to school,” he said. In fact, Columbia sells the bike lock at a discount to students (FAIR.org, 5/9/24).
CNN‘s Anderson Cooper (4/29/24) asked the Anti Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt about the outside agitators, “How many of them are actually students?” “A lot of them are not students,” Greenblatt replied, adding unironically: “You can’t even tell who’s an outside agitator and who’s an actual student.”
CNN senior political commentator David Axelrod tweeted (4/30/24): “It will be interesting to learn how many of those arrested in Hamilton Hall at Columbia are actually students.”
“I really believe they are brainwashed,” Donald Trump (Fox News, 4/30/24) said of student protesters.
Former president Donald Trump made a similar claim on Fox (4/30/24). “I really think you have a lot of paid agitators, professional agitators in here too, and I see it all over. And you know, when you see signs and they’re all identical, that means they’re being paid by a source,” he told Fox host Sean Hannity. He continued: “These are all signs that are identical. They’re made by the same printer.”
It’s worth noting that a political movement is not like an intercollegiate athletic competition, where it’s cheating for non-students to play on a college team; it’s not illegitimate for members of the broader community to join an on-campus protest, any more than it’s unethical for students to take part in demonstrations in their neighborhoods.
“If you’re a protester who’s planned it, you want all outsiders to join you,” Justin Hansford of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center told PolitiFact (5/6/24). “That’s why this is such a silly concept.”
That didn’t stop the New York Post (5/7/24) from publishing an op-ed by former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey headlined “Pursue Anti-Israel ‘Outside Agitators’ Disrupting Colleges—and End the Nonsense for Good.” McCaughey wrote, “Ray Kelly, former NYPD commissioner, nailed it Sunday when he said the nationwide turmoil ‘looks like a conspiracy.’” It looks like a conspiracy theory, anyway.
Tents situation
NYPD deputy police commissioner Kaz Daughtry (Fox 5 New York, 4/23/24): “Look at the tents. They all were the same color. They all were the same type of tents.”
One key piece of evidence offered for the “outside agitators” claim was the uniformity of many of the encampments’ tents. When Fox 5 New York (4/23/24) invited two NYPD representatives to discuss the protests, NYPD’s Daughtry said: “Look at the tents. They all were the same color. They all were the same type of tents.” He continued: “To me, I think somebody’s funding this. Also, there are professional agitators in there that are just looking for something to be agitated about, which are the protests.”
“Somebody’s behind this, and we’re going to find out who it is,” Daughtry said.
That students might be observing the world and their role in it, and acting accordingly, was not considered.
Newsweek (4/23/24) quoted Daughtry’s claim with no rebuttal or attempt to evaluate its veracity, under the headline, “Police Investigating People ‘Behind’ Pro-Palestinian Protests.” Fox News anchor Bret Baier (4/23/24) also cited the tents as a smoking gun: “We do see, it is pretty organized. The tents all look the same. And it’s expanding.”
The problem with this conspiracy theory is that the look-alike tents at most encampments were not expensive at all. As HellGateNYC (4/24/24) pointed out, the two-person tents seen at Columbia cost $28 on Amazon (where they’re the first listing that comes up when you search “cheap camping tent”), and the ones at NYU were even cheaper, at $15. While many Columbia students receive financial aid, the basic cost of tuition, fees, room and board at the school is $85,000 a year. What’s another $15?
‘Soros paying student radicals’
Fox News (4/26/24): “Progressive anti-Israel agitators across the country…are associated with groups tied to far-left groups with radical associations backed by dark money and liberal mega-donor George Soros.”
And finally, some news outlets alleged that the student protesters are funded by financier George Soros. For example, Fox (4/26/24) reported that a group that funds National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) received a donation from an unnamed nonprofit that is funded by Soros. Fox was apparently referring to the Tides Foundation, a philanthropy that Soros has given money to; Tides gave $132,000 to WESPAC, a Westchester, N.Y., peace group that serves as a financial sponsor to NSJP in Palestine (PolitiFact, 5/2/24; Washington Post, 4/26/24). In standard conspiratorial reasoning, this three-times-removed connection means that, as Fox put it, protests attended by SJP members are “backed by dark money and liberal mega-donor George Soros.”
The New York Post (4/26/24) published a similar piece, headlined “George Soros Is Paying Student Radicals Who Are Fueling Nationwide Explosion of Israel-Hating Protests.”
On NewsNation (5/1/24), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) also suggested Soros may be connected, saying that the FBI should investigate:
I think the FBI needs to be all over this. I think they need to look at the root causes and find out if some of this was funded by—I don’t know—George Soros or overseas entities. There’s sort of a common theme and a common strategy that seems to be pursued on many of these campuses.
Soros is a billionaire philanthropist who survived the Holocaust. He has come to represent an antisemitic trope among right wingers of a puppet master controlling events behind the scenes (see FAIR.org, 3/7/22). To put it simply, these supposedly antisemitic protesters are now on the receiving end of antisemitism.
Featured image: New York Post graphic (4/26/24) alleging that Jewish billionaire George Soros is bankrolling “Israel hate camps.”
From granular coverage of the career triumphs of nepo babies and the goings-on at elite universities, to deep dives about luxury real estate and ritzy goods and services most people have never heard of, it’s clear that the New York Times’ most cherished subject is the One Percent.
This is driven by prurient fascination with the lives of the rich and powerful, mixed with a priggish desire to shame them for individual consumer choices. (“Owning or operating a superyacht is probably the most harmful thing an individual can do to the climate”—4/10/23.) This reflects the class and educational background of Times staffers, many of whom are status-obsessed graduates of elite institutions whose personal wealth and privilege, or proximity to it, skews their worldview.
The New York Times (5/14/24) reports on how luxury hotels are offering “ever-more-lavish activities for guests,” including a “personalized shopping extravaganza”($2,860), an “Enlightenment Retreat” with “four days of holistic treatments ($5,745) or an “invitation to an artist’s private studio to learn about their process” ($7,500).
Here is the Times (5/4/24) on Dylan Lauren, the paradoxically svelte “candy queen of New York City” and empress of the boutique candy store chain Dylan’s Candy Bar:
Ms. Lauren, who is the daughter of the fashion designer Ralph Lauren, lives on the Upper East Side and in Bedford, N.Y., with her husband of nearly 13 years, Paul Arrouet, 53, who is a managing partner at a private equity firm, and their 9-year-old fraternal twins Cooper Blue and Kingsley Rainbow.
Yachts, butlers and “next-level” hotels are of keen and constant interest. The paper (4/10/23) declared last year:
If you’re a billionaire with a palatial boat, there’s only one thing to do in mid-May: Chart your course for Istanbul and join your fellow elites for an Oscars-style ceremony honoring the builders, designers and owners of the world’s most luxurious vessels.
This May alone, the Times ran stories on multimillion-dollar designer “eco-yachts” (“‘silent luxury’ is fast displacing opulence”—5/10/24), luxury hotel experiences (“From cooking with a Michelin-star chef to taking a chauffeured shopping spree in Singapore, hotels and resorts are offering ever-more-lavish activities for guests”—5/14/24), and a new breed of butler employed by “the One Percent of the One Percent” (“The modern butler…is no longer a grandfatherly type in morning trousers that stays in the background, if not out of sight”—5/14/24).
‘Affluent social cohort’
The founders of Betches Media have “the chance to make another $30 million if the company can reach certain revenue and profit targets by 2026” (New York Times, 5/11/24).
The paper finds much to admire in buzzy businesses founded by millennial and Gen Z entrepreneurs. Take Betches Media, a women’s humor company that satirizes the “affluent social cohort” of young women who grew up in the “well-to-do” Long Island suburb of Roslyn, and joined sororities while undergrads at Cornell University. Industry watchers “took notice” last fall when the company’s founders sold it to LBG Media for $24 million, the Times (5/11/24) reported. (The term “betch” is meant to “mock the preferences of a type of shallow, higher-income, college-educated woman,” who is also most likely white.) The sale netted the three founders around $8 million apiece. One told the Times she had treated herself to a gold Cartier watch; another said she had refreshed her wardrobe.
Several former Betches employees complained that many of the rank-and-file workers were underpaid, with some earning around $50,000 a year to churn out the content that made the business a success. Yet the focus on the more-affluent-than-ever founders suggests that the Times is more interested in winners who can afford Cartier watches than in the grumbling of those left behind.
The fact that the Betches Media founders attended Cornell is not an incidental detail. The Times’ coverage of Ivy League schools and their alumni sometimes suggests that if a phenomenon didn’t happen at an elite university, it didn’t really happen at all.
A 2021 story (6/7/21) on a Yale Law School kerfuffle dubbed “Dinner Party-gate” claimed that the episode exposed a culture that pitted “student against student” and “professor against professor,” forcing the school to confront a “venomous divide.” Far from being a tempest in a teapot, this was indicative of a broader cultural shift: Students at Yale Law now “regularly attack their professors, and one another, for their scholarship, professional choices and perceived political views.” In a place “awash in rumor and anonymous accusations,” the paper breathlessly continued, “almost no one would speak on the record.”
What exactly was “Dinner Party–gate,” and why did the Times consider it a story of compelling national interest? A group of students alleged that Amy Chua, a “popular but polarizing” professor, had been hosting drunken dinner parties with other students, and possibly federal judges, during the pandemic. Five paragraphs in, and after “more than two dozen interviews with students, professors and administrators,” the Times doggedly reported, “possibly the only sure thing in the murky saga is this: There is no hard proof that Ms. Chua is guilty of what she was originally accused of doing.” Nevertheless, the story persisted for an astonishing 36 paragraphs.
‘We’re not oligarchs’
A New York Times (11/3/17) love story: “When the night was over, they departed to their separate yachts.”
In addition to small private parties that may or may not have taken place at Yale Law School, the Times is always on hand to cover larger and more luxurious private parties. The principals of a 2017 wedding chronicled by the Times (11/3/17) met on a yachting excursion off the coast of Croatia. After the ceremony, “guests were greeted by two trumpeters in medieval attire at the Metropolitan Club on 60th Street,” and the bridal couple, who “created their own family crest” for their wedding invitations, menus, wax seals, programs, napkins and cake, departed the venue atop a white carriage drawn by two white Percherons.
In 2019, the Times (2/22/19) covered the union of law firm associate Yelena Ambartsumian and engineer and executive Miroslav Grajewski. Both are avid art collectors whose romance was fueled by “robust curiosity” and “the desire to build a legacy.” The art they’ve acquired includes pieces “priced in the tens of thousands or more.” (High-end art notwithstanding, the bride assured the Times, “We’re not oligarchs.”)
The couple married at St. Illuminator’s Armenian Apostolic Cathedral in Manhattan, and held their reception at Eleven Madison Park, a Manhattan restaurant the Michelin guide describes as a “temple of modern elegance” where “nothing is out of place and everything is custom made, from the staff’s suits to the handblown water vases.” Dinner for two, with wine, now costs $1,314.
Toward the end of the ceremony, the Times reported, the officiant “placed gilded coronets on the heads of the bride and groom, an Armenian tradition anointing the couple as the rulers of their domestic kingdom.”
It’s not just parties and weddings, but the luxury goods and services purchased for them, that catch the Times’ eye. In April, the paper (4/13/24) wrote about the cake designer Bastien Blanc-Tailleur, who creates “opulent confections” for “high-profile clients,” including European aristocrats, movie stars, fashion designers, and Saudi and Bahraini royals. Blanc-Tailleur’s wedding cakes start at 7,500 euros, or around $8,100, while simpler cakes, which start at roughly $3,700, are “relatively more affordable.”
‘Go broke or go home’
“People now look at pictures of others who might have incomes 10 to 100 times what we have,” a New York Times article (7/16/19) observes—referring to social media, though it could be talking about its own lifestyle coverage.
As fascinated as the Times is by the lifestyles of the rich and famous, it takes care to note that the luxe life is not for everyone. In a 2019 essay (7/16/19) on “Go Broke or Go Home Bachelorette Parties,” the paper tackled tough questions like, “What happens when friends are consumed by wanting their bachelorette parties to be picture perfect at any cost?” (Answer: “Credit cards are maxed out and debt rises.”)
Yet even essays warning against mindless excess tend to glamorize it at the same time. “The cost of bachelorette parties is ever growing, with weekend wedding festivities at destination locales now the norm,” the author noted, adding that millennials like her are “going broke” to attend. She then described a bachelorette outing she was invited to: “a long weekend in Spain from my home in Clifton, England, with an itinerary packed with VIP yacht trips, exclusive booths in glamorous nightclubs, a luxury villa and afternoon teas at high-end restaurants.” Suddenly racking up a little credit card debt doesn’t sound so bad!
Attraction to the sweet life is part of our culture. But readers would be better served by a newspaper that scrutinized rather than fetishized wealth and consumption.
This week on CounterSpin: Surprising no one, Donald Trump and his sycophants responded to his 34-count conviction on charges of lying in business records by claiming that the trial was “rigged,” the judge and jury corrupt, that it was somehow Joe Biden’s doing, and “you know who else was persecuted? Jesus Christ.” Trump publicly calling the judge a “devil,” and Bible-thumping House Speaker Mike Johnson and others showing up at the courthouse in Trump cosplay, were just some of the irregular, shall we say, elements of this trial. It is a moment to examine the right-wing media that have fomented this scary nonsense, but also to look to reporting from the so-called “mainstream” to go beyond the “some say, others differ” pablum we often see. We’ll talk with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, about press response to the trial and the verdict.
Also on the show: For some people the violent police crackdown on peaceful college students protesting their schools’ investments in Israel’s war on Palestinians has been eye-opening. For others, it’s one more example of the employment of law enforcement to brutally enforce corporate power. The fight led by Indigenous women against the Dakota Access pipeline is not long enough ago to have been forgotten. We’ll hear a bit from an August 2017 interview with North Dakota organizer Kandi Mossett.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Janine Jackson interviewed TheLever‘s Katherine Li about corporations’ First Amendment dodge for the May 31, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: CounterSpin listeners will likely know about what’s been called the “right-wing media machine.” It started, you could say, with ideologues and politicians with ideas, generally ideas about how to hurdle us back to at least the 19th century, legally and culturally. They then created think tanks and funded academics to polish up and promulgate those ideas. And they created and funded media outlets to push those ideas out.
It’s not, in other words, a reflection of a fortuitous coming together of like-minded individuals, but an echo chamber forged with the explicit purpose of maximizing a narrow viewpoint into a false consensus. The news article you read, after all, cites a professor and a pundit and a think tank and a guy on the street who read a thing, so it looks like multiple disparate sources who happen to agree.
Something analogous is happening now with corporations claiming the First Amendment says they don’t have to comply with regulations they don’t want to comply with, because those regulations reflect ideas that are “controversial,” and they can’t be compelled to take a public position on a controversial idea, like, for example, that climate disruption is real. It’s a weird, important maneuver, at once complicated and pretty simple, and it’s usefully unpacked in a recent piece by our guest.
Katherine Li is an editorial fellow at the Lever, where the piece, “Corporations Are Weaponizing Free Speech to Wreck the World,” appears. She joins us now by phone from Oakland, California. Welcome to CounterSpin, Katherine Li.
Katherine Li: Hi, Janine, very happy to be here. And let’s unpack this complicated piece.
JJ: Well, before we get to its current—you could say artful—employment, what is the “compelled speech” doctrine under the First Amendment? What do we think was the point of it when it was adopted?
KL: Well, as with the First Amendment, the compelled speech in the First Amendment—the original purpose is to say that the government cannot force people to say something they disagree with. That is perhaps illustrated in a very early compelled speech case that basically says that students do not have to stand up in school and salute the flag or the national anthem if they don’t want to.
Basically, it is to protect people from things that the government is forcing them to do, and it’s kind of to insulate people from government policies that impose things on them. The original intention, I do not believe, and experts I have interviewed for this story do not believe that the intention is for corporates to use such an argument in lawsuits.
JJ: All right, well then, let me just move on to asking you to please lay out for us what you call, in the lead to this informative piece for TheLever.com, “the novel legal strategy” that some corporations are now “pioneering,” you say, which sounds very different than “relying on”; they’re kind of trying to make something new here. Explain what you’re seeing.
KL: So traditionally, like I have just mentioned it, is to protect people from the government imposing things on them. But what is considered as speech has really exploded when it comes to the corporate landscape: Are tax returns and contracts considered speech? What does that mean for our government’s power to look into financial wrongdoing, and prevent tax fraud and prevent money laundering, if all of those things are considered as speech, and the government cannot force anybody to “say” and disclose such information?
So the corporates have definitely spotted that, and they have been trying to argue that these financial documents are considered as speech. So it started with drug pricing, it starts with the Corporate Transparency Act, that once there’s a precedent in the court system that says these things are considered speech, more cases are being invited and more cases are coming in this specific landscape. So basically they are saying that these things are considered speech, and therefore the government cannot compel them to disclose this information.
At first it starts with financial information. And right now we’re seeing that in Medicare drug negotiations, it is also happening. These commercial speeches are, according to the lawyers and experts I have spoken to, they don’t believe that these things should be considered; they don’t believe that this so-called commercial speech should be afforded the same amount of protection as traditional political expression, for example, like protesting or writing something in the media, or being censored or being prevented or being forced to make a certain political expression in the non-commercial sense.
So that is why in the article, and according to my experts, they believe this is a new strategy, that corporates are basically exploiting this argument in order to bring more and more cases, and expand the definition of what speech is.
JJ: Right. So then they seem as though they are complying with a law, or relying on a law, rather than sort of forging this new way.
Well, I think the examples really bring it home for people, what’s happening here, and there are a number of those examples in the piece, and each one is more disturbing and illuminating than the last. But one key one is, California has a new emissions disclosure law, that major companies doing business in California have to make public how much pollution they’re emitting throughout their supply chain. And we can understand why that’s important, because a company can say, “Well, our home office is zero emissions,” and that’s great, but what about your factories? What’s happening there?
So the public needs this information, this is information that the public is looking for, to get through the PR that these companies—fossil fuel companies in this case—might be putting out. And they’re saying, “No, we don’t need to comply with an emissions disclosure law, because that’s speech”?
KL: That is precisely what is happening. And the thing is, these emissions laws, they target companies with annual revenue above $1 billion. That is not asking our local coffee shop or the marketplace around the corner to figure out how much emissions are in their supply chain. It only really applies to large companies, especially oil companies, very large agricultural factory-farming companies.
So what initially caught my eye in the story is actually the arguments they have in the complaints that they filed against the emission disclosures law. The complaint, if you read it very closely, to anybody with common sense, it almost sounds ridiculous. Some of the arguments are saying that they fear that disclosing their emissions would allow activists, nonprofits and lawmakers to single out companies for investigation, which to me is just another word for accountability. I mean, that’s what our nonprofits and lawmaking agencies, it’s what they’re supposed to do, investigate and help create policy that can improve lives. So to me, it sounds like their effort to avoid accountability is very thinly veiled.
If you look at their complaint very closely, they also complain that this law would be compelling them to change their behavior. They complain that this law is changing and shaping their behavior, when, in reality, isn’t that what any laws and regulations are supposed to do? I mean, in any daily-life law, such as, like, hey, you cannot jaywalk, that is aiming to shape our behaviors, it’s aiming to change our behaviors.
So if you read the complaint closely, their efforts to avoid accountability, it’s honestly very thinly veiled. And it is, in a way, further expanding what is considered as speech, and also the whole circular argument that climate change is somehow “controversial.”
I also looked into the threshold of what could be considered as controversial when I first read their complaint. So then the lawyers I was talking to, the question I brought to them was, how low is the threshold to prove that something is scientifically controversial? And it turned out my instincts were correct, that the threshold of that is extremely low. They just have to prove that there’s a dissenting opinion. They don’t really have to prove that it is scientifically sound, and there’s no one to really check that.
JJ: So it’s just laid in a lap of particular courts, or particular decision makers. And it sounds as though they’re saying, particularly with that low threshold—or that very vague, undetermined threshold—that any regulation, because any regulation is about shaping behavior, it sounds like any regulation, they can dispute, because it’s aimed at asking them to do something different. I mean, am I misreading that, or is it really anti- any regulation whatsoever, in some way?
KL: In some way, that’s what it sounds like. Because if the complaint is about changing and shaping behavior, any regulations, that’s the point of it, changing behavior. And what is so wrong, what could be so wrong about forcing someone to lower their emissions at this point? It sounds like they’re saying that they shouldn’t lower their emissions, because either climate change doesn’t matter enough, or that climate change is not real. Like they said, they think it’s controversial.
JJ: Right. Well, just in case folks don’t understand, and of course we’ll send them to TheLever.com to read the piece, but you also have a food distribution and a restaurant supplies company, Cisco, that’s saying that you can’t force companies to read out notices of labor violations to workers, because they don’t want to. They don’t want to make that information available. And if they talk about labor violations in the workplace, well, that’s a “confession of sins,” and they shouldn’t be forced to do that. So this can reach into pretty much any area of our life, yeah?
KL: Yeah, definitely. Companies argue that if there has been a labor dispute, whatever the result is of that dispute, the company would post a sign somewhere in the facility, basically detailing the labor violation. But it doesn’t really achieve the same effect as reading it out in front of everybody, because it’s the difference between passively posting a sign somewhere and actively informing people what happened. And obviously, if a company has labor violations, they likely don’t want their workers to know. And if workers have also suffered the same violation, if the company reads it out, they might become more aware of it.
JJ: Well, it’s funny—if by funny, we mean perverse—because the narrative of capitalism that we often hear is that it relies on everyone being an informed economic actor, an individual actor who is making economic choices based on knowledge. And here we have corporations actively trying to reduce the available amount of information that a person could have to make decisions about what to buy or where to work or anything like that. It’s weird. This is how corporate capitalism subverts this notion that we hear about Capitalism 101, and building a better mousetrap, and all of that sort of thing.
Katherine Li: “They’re actually afraid that this information is going to get out and impact their profits, so that a lot of times their greenwashing or disinformation isn’t going to work anymore.”
KL: Definitely. Well, about the emissions case, part of their complaint is also that they might be more susceptible to boycott. I do believe that in this day and age, especially people of the younger generations, they’re much more aware of climate change, and a lot of times they would choose companies and products based on their perception of whether that company is being socially responsible enough.
So it’s obvious that a lot of corporates have caught up on that, and they’re now afraid that if they disclose how much they’re actually emitting, people are going to stop buying from them. They’re actually afraid that this information is going to get out and impact their profits, so that a lot of times their greenwashing or disinformation isn’t going to work anymore, because there will be a real concrete number for people to go on, and a number they cannot fake.
They could put on their website all they want, that we have this commitment in 10 years, we have this kind of green commitment; we’re going to become zero emissions by 2030. They could say what they want to say on their website, but once there’s a concrete number out there, none of that is going to work anymore. And they’re really afraid of that, clearly.
JJ: Afraid of an informed public.
Well, this only works with a certain kind of judicial landscape. I mean, you have to count on not getting laughed out of court with what looks to many people like a fairly transparent shenanigan, but obviously they believe that, for some reason, courts are going to be open to this particular kind of argument.
KL: Yes, unfortunately, multiple times courts have been open to this particular argument. And in terms of science, in California, the well-known case would be the Monsanto case.
For everyone who doesn’t know, Monsanto is a herbicide company. They make this herbicide called Roundup, and there is a certain chemical in it, where a lot of international scientists have said that it could potentially cause cancer in humans. So because science is never 100%, and that knowledge is constantly evolving, there is a loophole for them to say that there is contradicting science. And as we have later found out, Monsanto, the company, has also commissioned scientific studies to say that their product is safe.
And in California, that stood up in court. Because the court doesn’t really look at whether or not Monsanto has engineered this controversy that they’re claiming, this argument was allowed to pass California Proposition 65, which requires a warning label for a whole host of chemicals that could be cancerous and cause birth defects–Monsanto would not have to put that label on their specific herbicide product, because this whole “scientific controversy” thing was allowed to stand up in court.
So the consequences of that is now this argument was expanded. It’s not just one chemical anymore. It’s the entire mechanism of climate change that is being brought into question.
But the good news here is that sometimes courts are also beginning to hold the line, and recently there have been some positive developments. If you look at the most recent case of the Medicare drug negotiations under the Inflation Reduction Act, I believe it is the US Chamber of Commerce and different pharmaceutical companies, they were arguing that the Medicare drug negotiations, that the Inflation Reduction Act, is trying to “compel” them to agree with a government-determined price, and that they’re saying that is compelled speech.
So they have brought that point to multiple federal courts, including, most recently I believe, a federal court in Ohio. And these courts have fortunately rejected this argument, basically blocked the case on multiple occasions. So I do believe that courts are becoming aware of that, and that they’re beginning to curb these arguments, because in the past, when they have allowed these arguments to pass, sometimes, likely in the next case, the argument becomes expanded.
JJ: Right. Well, I was going to push you further on that, in terms of, it sounds like courts are cottoning on and pushing back. Are there other policy or legislative responses that seem appropriate here, or is it mainly a matter for the courts? And then, do you have thoughts about—because I have not seen this in other reporting—what media might do in terms of disclosing this, putting some sunlight on this, as part of a pushback against what seems clearly like an anti-regulatory, anti–public information effort?
KL: Well, to answer the first question, I do believe this matter is mainly up to the courts, even though, in terms of lawmaking, there can be laws that make up for what the courts are not doing. At the end of the story that I wrote about this, I mentioned a doctrine called the major questions doctrine. A lot of times what the states are allowed to do and what the states are allowed to regulate, what the federal agencies are allowed to regulate in states, is significantly limited. So a lot of times, these things become left up to courts in a major case, to basically make a decision on whether what the individual states are doing is lawful or not.
I believe that if the federal regulatory agencies oftentimes could have more power to pass more sweeping regulations on these things, and that federal regulatory agencies could have more power to fight these law cases if they are sued on a particular point, for example, like the Inflation Reduction Act…. I believe that federal agencies should be given more power to decide, instead of leaving it up to the courts, because the court doesn’t always hold the line.
They’re beginning to, but, for example, the California emissions disclosure case, it’s still very much up in the air, and it’s an entirely new regulation. No other states have implemented it yet; it’s just California, and there are no federal regulations on how companies could be more accountable for the emissions they’re putting out.
And in terms of how media could report on this, I would say, a lot of times, this type of story, it’s very, very helpful to talk to lawyers, because a lot of the cases that I have found, and also trying to figure out how low the scientific threshold is to basically prove that something is controversial: the lawyers know. They are a treasure trove of past cases, because that is their job. And a lot of times, they really enjoy talking to journalists, laying out their cases, and basically walking you through the steps and loopholes that are in our law, because that is their profession.
I would also say, I can understand that sometimes it’s hard to write about something that doesn’t have a main human character in it. Sometimes it’s hard to make it interesting, and it could be easy to overlook these stories. But personally, I think that even a seemingly boring document could contain very interesting information.
For example, the initial complaint that’s filed against the California Emissions Disclosure Law, if you look at the information closely, it might look like a boring document, but the more you read, you’re like, “Wow, this doesn’t make sense. Am I hallucinating this, or is this real?” So then you go to a lawyer, and verify that information. Is this a trend I’m spotting? Is this a problem? Do you think it’s a problem? And these kind of stories could end up being very interesting.
And I would say that, also, it’s important to look into lobbying data, and frame the story looking at who is responsible, and not only looking at what the problem is. I feel like stories could become much more powerful when you look at the how, the mechanism, the larger mechanism that’s at work, instead of only focusing on one specific event or one isolated event that’s happening. Sometimes the more people, the more professionals, you talk to, you start to see a network and a storyline, and how there’s a loophole, and the mechanism of how things work behind the scenes.
JJ: Absolutely. Well, that’s excellent. We’ll end it there for now.
We’ve been speaking with Katherine Li. She’s editorial fellow at the Lever, online at TheLever.com, where you can find this informative article, “Corporations Are Weaponizing Free Speech to Wreck the World,” that we’ve been talking about. Thank you so much, Katherine Li, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Claudia Sheinbaum has made history. A leftist from the ruling party and former head of government for Mexico City, she will be Mexico’s first woman and first Jewish president. But all the US press wants to know is whether she is just going to be a puppet of the big, scary outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as AMLO.
AP (5/22/24): “Sheinbaum has to be very careful…to avoid appearing to contradict or criticize López Obrador.”
The AP (5/22/24) said Sheinbaum left “many wondering whether she can escape the shadow of the larger-than-life incumbent.” Vox (6/2/24) said, on the issues of government corruption and narco violence, “Now the question is to what extent Sheinbaum will be able to make progress on these concerns while operating under the shadow of her mentor.”
The New York Times (5/30/24) said that “she has an image problem, and she knows it.” The article explained: “Many Mexicans are wondering: Can she be her own leader? Or is she a pawn of the current president?”
A Washington Post (2/28/24) columnist called Sheinbaum AMLO’s “heir,” and wrote that while she “is more of a mystery…she has people worried.” The Christian Science Monitor (5/28/24) also called her AMLO’s “hand-picked successor.” The New York Times (6/4/24) also said that “some observers believe [AMLO] will find a way to continue to exert influence behind the scenes” after he leaves, calling Sheinbaum his “handpicked successor.”
Mary Anastasia O’Grady, Americas columnist for the Wall Street Journal (5/26/24), went further, saying Sheinbaum is not just an extension of AMLO, but a threat to democracy itself, as she was “handpicked by the president” and “is a symbol of continuity with his agenda.” She accused Sheinbaum of wanting “to crush pluralism and grab control of the Supreme Court,” forcing Mexico to revert “to a one-party state, as it was during the 71-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.”
By virtue of Mexican law, AMLO can only serve one term. The idea that a party winning two elections in a row, potentially tipping the balance of the court, is somehow a reversion to the seven decades of PRI rule is a bit of a stretch; would Hillary Clinton have created a “one-party state” if she had won the US presidency in 2016? It’s also misleading to call Sheinbaum “hand-picked,” as she won AMLO’s support only after a messy intra-party struggle, as is common in the democratic political battlefield (AP, 10/6/22; Foreign Policy, 6/9/23).
No ‘decent alternative’
For Time (5/30/24), the “tragedy” was that few Mexicans wanted to vote for the candidate who represented the two parties that had governed their country for 72 years before 2018.
Time (5/30/24) also complained that Sheinbaum was the “anointed” AMLO replacement, saying the problem of her victory is “how easily this triumph has been handed to her.” “Most Mexicans don’t necessarily adore the current government,” Alex González Ormerod wrote, but they “simply have not been given a decent alternative to vote for.”
This kind of pabulum is an observation any half-educated analyst could have made about a random election in the United States, France or Iran. Yet the fact that there is not a viable pro-rich political movement in Mexico is treated as an existential crisis for the US press.
If AMLO’s record and Sheinbaum’s proposals for her term were so terrible, one might imagine that opposition parties could take advantage of that. “The majority of her support comes from AMLO,” said Andalusia Knoll Soloff, an independent journalist based in Mexico, in a phone interview. “She appeals to the values of the people of AMLO.” But she added that it is an exaggeration to say she’s made in the mold of the outgoing president, saying it is “untrue that she is a puppet of AMLO.”
What is happening here is the media myth that Sheinbaum, a scientist and successful left-wing politician, somehow lacks any agency of her own, when it is perfectly sensical that AMLO’s party would want to continue many of his policies in a second term. AMLO, like Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, sits in the American media consciousness as a thuggish caudillo who is undermining the goals of US businesses in Latin America, a kind of act of war against the Monroe Doctrine.
‘Pragmatic’ or ‘ideological’?
Politico (6/1/24) wonders whether Sheinbaum will “prioritize efficiency over ideology, or be “a mere puppet of López Obrador” and “follow in his leftist footsteps.”
Thus Sheinbaum is viewed with suspicion. Examine, for instance, this summary from Politico (6/1/24), which wondered whether Sheinbaum would govern as “pragmatist” or “ideologue”:
On one hand, [Sheinbaum’s] an accomplished physicist with expertise in environmental science and a reputation for pragmatism. On the other, she’s a long-time leftist activist, a close ally and champion of López Obrador—a divisive figure who came to power promising to represent the lowest echelons of Mexican society and, during his tenure, increased social spending to a historic high while simultaneously attacking Mexico’s system of checks and balances.
In what world are these two incompatible things? It’s quite easy that someone can be a devotee of science and also prefer politics that help the poor and working class over the rich—just ask Albert Einstein (Monthly Review, 5/1/09) or Carl Sagan (New York Post, 10/5/20).
But Politico made its particular definitions of “pragmatist” and “ideologue” clear later, when it suggested that “a more ideological and leftist Sheinbaum” might “seek more beneficial terms for Mexico” in upcoming trade talks with the US and Canada, while a “more pragmatic Sheinbaum…could find compromises when discussing trade, and agree on a middle ground for investigating cartels with US support without risking Mexico’s sovereignty.” In other words: “pragmatic” means doing what’s best for the US, “ideological” means doing what’s best for the Mexican people she represents.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board (6/3/24) also used this dichotomy. “Markets will be looking to see which Claudia Sheinbaum emerges in office—the ideologue or a more pragmatic deal-maker,” the paper said. It added that she “has promised to put the poor first, but that means Mexico’s economy will need to keep growing.” In the Journal‘s worldview, this means “policies that attract foreign capital to expand prosperity.”
A new environmental focus
“For those hoping Mexico will fully embrace climate protection, natural-resource conservation and clean energy policies,” EcoAmericas (4/23) last year said Sheinbaum might be “a ray of hope.”
Sheinbaum’s climate policies for Mexico City, once known for its terrible pollution, have also bolstered her progressive politics. Visitors to Mexico City today find a world-class capital with clean streets and lovely parks, aided by a large public transit system.
[Supporters] point to her time spent governing Mexico City, when she made significant advancements in science by initiating the construction of the world’s largest urban photovoltaic plant, which cost 661 million pesos (US$39 million) to build.
It added that her “administration also established the first rapid-transit network of buses in the city—and in Latin America—that run on electricity.” EcoAmericas (4/23) reported on her environmental policy in Mexico City, saying her agenda included “rainwater harvesting, green-space expansion, watershed conservation, extensive planting initiatives, air-quality improvement [and] waste reduction,” as well as improving the city’s transit system. And the Wilson Center (10/24/23) noted that as environmental secretary in the city government, Sheinbaum oversaw “the creation of the first line of the metrobús, Mexico City’s bus rapid transit system.”
By contrast, AMLO’s unmoored populism put him at odds with climate activists (AP, 8/28/20, 3/23/22, 11/24/23; Guardian, 11/8/22). Sheinbaum has disappointed environmental activists with promises to increase oil production as president, but has also promised a major investment in green energy (New Republic, 5/31/24). She has vowed “to accelerate the energy transition with new solar, wind and hydropower projects” (Argus, 4/17/24). AMLO had “tended to prioritize domestic fossil fuel resources over low-carbon alternatives” (Yale Climate Connections, 4/10/24).
As Reuters (5/28/24) noted, Sheinbaum and the outgoing president are indeed allies, but hardly the same; Sheinbaum, the scientist, took the Covid pandemic seriously, while AMLO fell to anti-mask populism.
There’s a racist connotation against Latin Americans that a second term for a leftist coalition means there is a Svengali calling all the shots without popular consent. With Sheinbaum, there is also the insinuation that a woman could simply not rise to this level without a “strong man” behind her.
It remains to be seen how Sheinbaum will actually govern, but since, like AMLO, she does not promise to accede to every US demand, the US press corps has already settled comfortably into its time-worn tradition of casting the election of a leftist Latin American as undemocratic.
Donald Trump is now the first former US president to be convicted of a felony, found guilty on 34 counts of “in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex” (AP, 5/31/24). Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement (5/30/24) that Trump was found “guilty of repeatedly and fraudulently falsifying business records in a scheme to conceal damaging information from American voters during the 2016 presidential election,” and that his prosecutors “proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Trump illegally falsified 34 New York business records.”
Trump’s shot at retaking the White House is far from finished (Guardian, 5/30/24), and he may very well evade jail (NBC, 5/30/24), but the right-wing press is howling anyway.
‘A bizarre turducken’
“If Democrats felt like cheering Thursday when the guilty verdict was read, they should think again,” the Wall Street Journal (5/30/24) warned, as “Mr. Trump has already vowed to return the favor.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (5/30/24) painted Bragg’s case against Trump as “a bizarre turducken, with alleged crimes stuffed inside other crimes.” It suggested the DA was motivated less by executing the law than by kneecapping Trump’s bid for the White House. The whole affair, the paper said, leads us to more division:
What if Mr. Trump loses the election and then is vindicated on appeal? If Democrats think that too many Republicans today complain about stolen elections, imagine how many more might next year.
The conviction sets a precedent of using legal cases, no matter how sketchy, to try to knock out political opponents, including former presidents. Mr. Trump has already vowed to return the favor. If Democrats felt like cheering Thursday when the guilty verdict was read, they should think again. Mr. Bragg might have opened a new destabilizing era of American politics, and no one can say how it will end.
The New York Post (5/31/24) ran the front-page headline “Injustice,” while its editorial board (5/31/24) argued that Democrats’ happiness at the conviction “itself is ample reason for the court of public opinion to vote [President Joe Biden] out come Election Day.”
The Washington Post (5/31/24) reported on the meltdown at Fox News:
“This is a very sad day for all of us, irrespective of party, irrespective of affiliation,” Fox News host Jeanine Pirro said on the network’s 5 p.m. show. “We have seen the criminal justice weaponized to bring down a candidate for president and a former president.”
On her 7 p.m. show, Laura Ingraham called it “a disgraceful day for the United States, a day that America may never recover from,” while 9 p.m. host Sean Hannity called it “a conviction without a crime.”
All too typical
Talkshow host Charlie Kirk (Alaska Must Read, 5/30/24) warned that “there will be an unprecedented push to say that Trump CANNOT be allowed to win, that we CANNOT elect a convicted felon.”
What comes up over and over again in coverage of both the Manhattan hush-money case―as well as two federal cases against Trump, and one election-related case in Atlanta―is that the prosecution and conviction of a former president is without precedent (Fox News, 5/30/24; New York Times, 5/30/24; NPR, 5/30/24). The theory goes that these prosecutions are so divisive, in such a politically volatile moment, that they should force us to weigh the pursuit of justice against political stability.
Yet, for journalists who looked at the Manhattan courtroom, Trump sat there like many other New York politicians and political influencers whose criminality brought them down. Trump, who was born in Queens and made his name in Manhattan, is a businessman shaped by the New York City real estate industry and the political machines around it. That’s an exciting place to be. But it’s also a very corrupt one (WHEC, 8/13/21).
In this context, Trump’s conviction is less a partisan witch hunt or a crossing-the-Rubicon moment for US history, and more another New York politician getting caught up in a scandal that is all too typical of the city and state that made him.
New York, of course, is hardly unique in having a tradition of officials getting caught with their hands in the till. But those who follow New York politics can cite a long line of prominent politicians brought down by corruption investigations.
Sheldon Silver, the lower Manhattan Democrat who for 20 years ruled the state assembly with an iron fist, died in federal custody due to corruption charges (Guardian, 1/24/22).
The Washington Post (5/12/16) could have run this exact same headline about two different New York senate majority leaders over a four-year period.
On the Republican side, former Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos was convicted, along with his son, for “pressuring companies that relied heavily on government contracts to give his son nominal but lucrative jobs” (Washington Post, 5/12/16). Joe Bruno, Skelos’ Republican predecessor, was also found guilty on corruption charges, though he was acquitted in a retrial (New York Times, 5/16/14).
A Democratic senate majority leader, Democrat Malcolm Smith, was given “seven years in prison after being convicted of trying to bribe his way onto the Republican ballot in the 2013 race for New York City mayor” (Politico, 7/1/15). Smith was followed by Pedro Espada Jr., who was subsequently sentenced to five years in prison for embezzling from federally funded healthcare clinics (New York Times, 6/14/12).
While former Gov. Eliot Spitzer never saw a courtroom, a federal investigation into a prostitution ring revealed him as a client and ended his political career (NPR, 3/12/08).
The current New York City mayor, Democrat Eric Adams, is under federal investigation for possible illegal connections to Turkey (CBS, 5/21/24). His buildings department commissioner, Republican Eric Ulrich, has been charged with running “a years-long scheme doling out political favors in exchange for more than $150,000 in bribes” (New York Post, 9/13/23).
Prosecution of corruption isn’t confined to the public sector; the former federal prosecutor for Manhattan, Preet Bharara, made a name for himself by going after white-collar criminals (New Yorker, 3/13/17). And let’s not forget the many union leaders nabbed for corruption over the years (New York Post, 7/26/00; New York Times, 5/20/09, 8/5/09; CNN,8/5/23).
Removed from sordid politics
Obviously, in the US consciousness, the president stands above all over elected leaders, including Supreme Court justices and congressional leaders, as well as the top honchos at the state level. The president leads the military, represents the nation on the world stage, and stands (theoretically) as a unifying figure for the American people. But this mythology of a sort of king-like figure not only warps the notion of small-r republican governance, but removes the president from the rest of sordid politics in an extremely dishonest way.
For those who have studied Trump’s career, despite rising to the White House and photo shoots all over the world, he is, in essence, a product of New York City. His business empire, political dealings and image in the tabloid press were created and shaped by New York’s dirty political culture.
The conviction will be the stuff of partisan rabble in the media for days and weeks. But in reality, he’s just another member of the city’s political and business class who got caught committing banal crimes. Media would be better off framing his conviction in the context of how routine it was, given the venue, rather than offering it as a novel soul-searching moment for the nation.
This week on CounterSpin: In 2023, the California legislature passed legislation that said that big corporations doing business in the state have to tell the public, investors, how much pollution they’re emitting throughout their supply chain. It’s knowable information, and people have a right to know it, right? The same way restaurants here in New York City have to tell potential customers how they did on their last health inspection; you can eat there or not, but at least you’re making an informed decision.
But no! This past January, the US Chamber of Commerce and a bunch of other industry groups challenged those laws, because, they said, making companies disclose the impact of their actions—in this case, their emissions—would force them to publicly express a “speculative, noncommercial, controversial and politically charged message.” That, they said, makes the laws a “pressure campaign” aimed at shaping company behavior.
Unfortunately, some courts are indulging this bizarre notion that regulation should be illegal, essentially, because it forces companies to say stuff they’d rather not say. Fortunately, other courts are calling this self-serving nonsense self-serving nonsense. But it’s not just a legal matter; public information, our right to know, is also on the line here, so we should know what’s going on.
Katherine Li addresses this issue in a recent piece for the Lever, where she is an editorial fellow. We hear from her this week on CounterSpin.
The New York Times (4/8/24) cited “experts” who called Nicaragua charging Germany with facilitating genocide “a cynical move by a totalitarian government to bolster its profile and distract attention from its own worsening record of repression.”
When Nicaragua accused Germany of aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide in Gaza at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) last month, readers of corporate media might have seriously wondered whether Nicaragua’s case had any legitimacy.
The case targeted Germany as the second biggest supplier of arms to Israel, because the US, Israel’s biggest supplier, does not accept the court’s jurisdiction on this issue. The object (as Nicaragua’s lawyer explained) was to create a precedent with wider application: that countries must take responsibility for the consequences of their arms sales to avoid them being used in breach of international law.
Many in corporate media took a more jaundiced view. The Financial Times (4/8/24) led by telling readers, “The authoritarian government of Nicaragua accused Germany of ‘facilitating genocide’ in Gaza at the opening of a politically charged case.” The second paragraph in a New York Times article (4/8/24) cited “experts” who saw it “as a cynical move by a totalitarian government to bolster its profile and distract attention from its own worsening record of repression.” The Guardian (4/9/24) qualified its comment piece by remarking that “Nicaragua is hardly a poster child when it comes to respect for human rights.”
Double standards are evident here. If the US government were to do what it has failed to do so far, and condemn Israel’s genocidal violence, Western corporate media would not remind readers of US crimes against humanity, such as the Abu Ghraib tortures, extraordinary renditions, or the hundreds imprisoned without trial at Guantánamo. It’s hard to imagine Washington would be accused of “hypocrisy” (Guardian, 4/9/24) for calling out Israel’s crimes. Any condemnation of Israel by the US or one of its Western allies would be taken at face value—in clear contrast to the media’s treatment of such action by an official enemy country like Nicaragua.
Germany ‘as its finest’
For El País (4/11/24), facilitating mass slaughter in Gaza is “Germany…at its finest,” because it it is “driven by its sense of responsibility stemming from a tragic history.”
Of establishment media, Spain’s El País (4/11/24) was perhaps the most vitriolic in its portrayal of Nicaragua. Its piece on the court case was headlined “The Worst Version of Nicaragua Against the Best Version of Germany.”
“The third international court case on the Gaza war pits a regime accused of crimes against humanity against a strong and legitimate democracy,” the piece explained. “It may be a noble cause, but its champion couldn’t be worse.”
The article, which relayed none of the evidence offered by either side, commented rather oddly that Germany was “at its finest” arguing the case, and that its “defense against Nicaragua’s charges is solid and its legitimacy as a democratic state is unassailable”—a comment presumably intended to contrast its legitimacy with “the Nicaraguan dictatorship.”
In addition to its article cited above, the New York Times (4/8/24) had a report more focused on the case itself. However, it was CNN (4/9/24) and Al Jazeera (4/8/24) that stood out as covering the case on its own merits rather than being distracted by animosity toward Nicaragua.
The negative presentation in much of the media was repeated when, later in April, they headlined that Nicaragua’s request had been “rejected” by the ICJ (e.g., AP, 4/30/24; NPR, 4/30/24), with the New York Times (4/30/24) again remembering to insert a derogatory comment about Nicaragua’s action being “hypocritical.” These followup reports largely overlooked the impact the case had on Germany’s ability to further arm Israel during its continued assault on Gaza.
Nicaraguan ‘Nazis’
The New York Times (3/2/23) ran a headline equating the Nicaraguan Sandinistas with the German Nazi Party, based on the claim that “the weaponizing of the justice system against political opponents in the way that is done in Nicaragua is exactly what the Nazi regime did.”
Corporate media had been gifted their criticisms of Nicaragua by a report published at the end of February by the UN Human Rights Council. A “group of human rights experts on Nicaragua” (the “GHREN”) had produced its second report on the country. Its first, last year, had accused Nicaragua’s government of crimes against humanity, leading to this eyebrow-raising New York Times headline (3/2/23): “Nicaragua’s ‘Nazis’: Stunned Investigators Cite Hitler’s Germany.”
The GHREN’s leader, German lawyer Jan-Michael Simon, had indeed likened the current Sandinista government to the Nazis. Times reporter Frances Robles quoted Simon:
“The weaponizing of the justice system against political opponents in the way that is done in Nicaragua is exactly what the Nazi regime did,” Jan-Michael Simon, who led the team of UN-appointed criminal justice experts, said in an interview.
“People massively stripped of their nationality and being expelled out of the country: This is exactly what the Nazis did too,” he added.
It’s quite an accusation, given that the Nazis established over 44,000 incarceration camps of various types and killed some 17 million people. Robles gave few numbers regarding the crimes Nicaragua is accused of, but did mention 40 extrajudicial killings in 2018 attributed to state and allied actors, and noted that the Ortega government had in 2023 “stripped the citizenship from 300 Nicaraguans who a judge called ‘traitors to the homeland.’”
Robles also quoted Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a member of the Nicaraguan oligarchic family who are among the Sandinista government’s fiercest opponents; Chamorro claimed there was evidence of “more than 350 people who were assassinated.” Even if true, this would seem to be a serious stretch from “exactly what the Nazis did.”
Like most Western reporters, Robles—who also wrote the recent ICJ piece for the Times—gave no attention to the criticisms of the GHREN’s work by human rights specialists, who argued that the GHREN did not examine all the evidence made available to it and interviewed only opposition sources. For example, former UN independent expert Alfred de Zayas castigated its first report in his book The Human Rights Industry, calling it a “political pamphlet” intended to destabilize Nicaragua’s government.
Even if one takes the GHREN account at face value, the Gaza genocide is at least 100 times worse in terms of numbers of fatalities, quite apart from other horrendous elements, such as deliberate starvation, indiscriminate bombing, destruction of hospitals and much more. It’s unclear why the accusations against Nicaragua should delegitimize the case against Germany.
Hague history
In 1986, the New York Times (6/28/86) reported that the ICJ found the US guilty of ”training, arming, equipping, financing and supplying the contra forces,” and of “direct attacks on Nicaraguan oil installations, ports and shipping.”
Many media reports did mention Nicaragua’s long history of support for Palestine—which undermines the accusation of cynicism underlying the case—but few noted the Latin American country’s history of success at the Hague. As Carlos Argüello, the Nicaraguan ambassador to the Netherlands who took the lead at the ICJ, pointed out, Nicaragua has more experience at the Hague than most countries, including Germany. This began with its pioneer case against the US in 1984, when it won compensation of £17 billion (that was never paid) for the damage done to Nicaragua by the US-funded Contra war and the mining of its ports.
One notable exception to that historical erasure came from Robles at the Times (4/8/24), who did refer to the 1984 case. But the point was clearly not to remind readers of US crimes, or to demonstrate that Nicaragua is an actor to be taken seriously in the realm of international law. The two academics she quoted both served to portray the current case as merely “cynical.”
The first, Mateo Jarquín, Robles quoted as saying that the Sandinista government has “a long track record…of using global bodies like the ICJ to carve out space for itself internationally—to build legitimacy and resist diplomatic isolation.” Robles didn’t disclose Jarquín’s second surname, Chamorro. Like her source in the earlier article, he is a member of the family that includes several government opponents.
Robles also quoted Manuel Orozco, a former Nicaraguan working at the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue, whose major funders include the US Agency for International Development and the International Republican Institute, notorious for their role in promoting regime change, including in Nicaragua. Orozco told Robles that “Nicaragua lacks the moral and political authority to speak or advocate for human rights, much less on matters of genocide.”
‘Effectively siding with Germany’
AP (4/30/24) missed the significance of the ICJ holding that, “at present, the circumstances are not such as to require” an order forbidding Germany to ship weapons to Israel—namely, that Germany maintained that it already halted shipments of such weapons (Verfassungblog, 5/2/24).
On April 30, the ICJ declined to grant Nicaragua its requested provisional measures against Germany, including requiring the cessation of arms deliveries to Israel. Headlining this outcome, the Associated Press (4/30/24) said the court was “effectively siding with Germany.” The outlet did, however, continue by explaining that the court had “declined to throw out the case altogether, as Germany had requested,” and will hear arguments from both sides, with a resolution not likely to come for years.
That was better than NPR‘s report (4/30/24), which only mentioned that the court was proceeding with the case in its final paragraph.
But German lawyer and professor Stefan Talmon (Verfassungblog, 5/2/24), clarified that the court’s ruling “severely limits Germany’s ability to transfer arms to Israel.”
“The court’s order was widely interpreted as a victory for Germany,” Talmon commented. “A closer examination of the order, however, points to the opposite.” He concluded that although the ICJ did not generally ban the provision of arms to Israel, it did impose significant restrictions on it by emphasizing Germany’s obligation to “avoid the risk that such arms might be used to violate the [Genocide and Geneva] Conventions.”
And Talmon pointed out that the court appeared to make its decision that an order to halt war weapons shipments was unnecessary based on Germany’s claim that it had already stopped doing so.
“By expressly emphasizing that, ‘at present’, circumstances did not require the indication of provisional measures, the Court made it clear that it could indicate such measures in the future,” Talmon wrote.
Establishment media, seemingly distracted by the “hypocrisy” of Nicaragua challenging a country whose “legitimacy as a democratic state is unassailable,” mostly failed to notice that its legal efforts were therefore at least partially successful: It forced Germany to back down from its unstinting support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and alerted German politicians to the fact that they are at risk of being held accountable under international law if they transfer any further war weapons.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by John Perry.
“Do you condemn Hamas?” This question is a familiar response from corporate journalists and pro-Israel advocates whenever anyone urges the Israeli military to stop its offensive in Gaza (Declassified UK, 11/4/23; Forward, 11/10/23; Jewish Journal, 11/29/23). If you denounce Israel’s response to the attacks without condemning Hamas, the insinuation goes, you are defending the militant group and the killing of Israeli civilians.
If you don’t start off by condemning Hamas’ attack, the British pundit Piers Morgan (Twitter, 11/23/23) said, “why should anyone listen to you when you condemn Israel for its response?”
The International Criminal Court surely condemned Hamas when an ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, sought arrest warrants for Hamas’ three principal leaders along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister (Reuters, 5/21/24). That hasn’t helped the ICC in the press. By condemning both Hamas and Israel leaders for illegal acts of violence, the ICC is delegitimizing Israel, editorialists say.
‘A slander for the history books’
The New York Post (5/20/24) was outraged by “the ICC’s morally perverse bid to seem ‘fair’ by also seeking warrants for some leaders of Hamas.”
“Lumping them together is a slander for the history books. Imagine some international body prosecuting Tojo and Roosevelt, or Hitler and Churchill, amid World War II,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (5/20/24) said. It added that “Israel has facilitated the entry of 542,570 tons of aid, and 28,255 aid trucks, in an unprecedented effort to supply an enemy’s civilians.”
For the record, the UN has estimated that Gaza needs 500 truckloads of humanitarian aid a day—so nearly four times as many as Israel has allowed in. Israeli soldiers have reportedly helped protesters block aid trucks (Guardian, 5/21/24), while the IDF has relentlessly targeted medical facilities (Al Jazeera, 12/18/23). And Israeli “forces have carried out at least eight strikes on aid workers’ convoys and premises in Gaza since October 2023,” according to Human Rights Watch (5/14/24).
The New York Post editorial board (5/20/24) engages in the same logic, saying Hamas leaders are “cold-blooded savages—who target innocent civilians for murder, rape and kidnapping,” while Israel is pure at heart: “law-abiding, democratic victims, who merely seek to eradicate the terror gang.”
Back on Planet Earth, Israel has targetedhospitals, journalists, schools and aid workers. The United Nations has declared a famine is underway (AP, 5/6/24), and its data show the death toll for Palestinians since October 7 is nearly 30 times larger than for Israelis, a testament to the conflict’s imbalance of might and ferocity. The UN estimates nearly 8,000 Gazan children have been killed (NPR, 5/15/24).
‘Digging its own grave’
For the New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (5/21/24), the “decision to seek the arrest of three Hamas leaders along with Netanyahu” was part of a strategy to destroy Israel, “as it places Israel’s leaders on a moral par with a trio of terrorists.”
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (5/21/24), who is loved by the right-wing fanatics at the New YorkPost (4/28/17, 8/27/19, 12/29/19, 2/11/21) for his backward views on social issues and his desire to rob his critics of free speech rights, said that by going after both Israeli and Hamas leaders, the court was part of an “overall strategy” to bring about Israel’s downfall through alienation, as the equivalency “places Israel’s leaders on a moral par with a trio of terrorists.” In other words, it treats Israel as being morally equivalent to a group that has killed less than 1% as many children.
The Washington Post‘s opinion page (5/21/24) featured multiple sides in response to the news, including human rights scholar Noura Erakat, who said, if anything, Khan was too easy on Israel. But the Post’s roundtable also featured former Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Avi Mayer, a pro-Israel public relations professional who left that paper amid turmoil (Forward, 12/15/23). He said comparing Israel to its “cruel and implacable foe against which it is defending itself will be met with wall-to-wall resistance and steely determination.”
The Post also featured Bush II and Trump administration hawk John Bolton, who ignored the accusations against Hamas altogether, saying the “ICC has finally and irreversibly begun digging its own grave”—not just because of the charge against Israel, but because the court is “untethered to any constitutional structure, unchecked by distinct legislative or executive authorities, and utterly unable to enforce its decisions.”
The Post could have found much more nuanced voices to critique Khan. Mayer is hardly a scholar looking at the situation with cold eyes; he’s a dedicated promoter of Israeli policy who only briefly worked as a newspaper editor (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 3/21/23). Bolton’s entire persona revolves around opposing the notion of international justice (Politico, 9/23/18; Washington Post, 10/10/18); the ICC could have opened a cat shelter and he would have found a way to argue that this harmed US interests. Meanwhile, one of the legal advisors who had recommended seeking arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders was a former Israeli diplomat and Holocaust survivor (Forward, 5/23/24).
Across the pond, the editorial board of the Telegraph (5/21/24), the main print voice of British conservatism, said that the “moral equivalence” of Hamas and Israeli leaders was “absurd.” The London Times (5/21/24) simply said the ICC’s action wouldn’t help the situation in Gaza.
These views reflect the official line of the White House (CNN, 5/20/24), 10 Downing Street (Politico, 5/21/24) and Netanyahu (Reuters, 5/20/24).
An unsurprising outcome
Chief ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, a British lawyer, compared Israeli actions to the British government saying “let’s drop a 2,000-pound bomb on the Falls Road” in response to IRA attacks (Jewish Chronicle, 5/26/24).
You just can’t win, can you? Had the ICC prosecutor sought arrest warrants only for Israeli leaders, we can only imagine that these same outlets would condemn it as a one-sided interpretation of the war. In other words, there is simply no scenario in which criticism or scrutiny of Israel can take place.
For those who have actually studied conflict and human rights, it is just not surprising that an international body would recognize war crimes by both the military of a recognized government and an armed faction dubbed a “terrorist” group. A United Nations panel found that while the separatist Tamil Tigers committed atrocities in the last days of the Sri Lankan civil war, the final government offensive caused the “deaths of as many as 40,000 civilians, most of them victims of indiscriminate shelling by Sri Lankan forces” (Washington Post, 4/21/11).
A 2020 Human Rights Watch report noted that Syrian and Russian government forces in the Syrian Civil War used “indiscriminate attacks and prohibited weapons,” while opposition groups carried out “serious abuses, leading arbitrary arrest campaigns in areas they control and launching indiscriminate ground attacks on populated residential areas.”
The news that the ICC was indicting members of a militant anti-government group along with leaders of the government that group opposes falls into that same unsurprising category.
In fact, Khan told the London Times (5/25/24) that he believed Israel had a right to defend itself and seek the return of the October 7 hostages, but not to enact collective punishment on the Palestinians. And “he did not understand, given his warnings to comply with international law over the past months, why anyone was surprised” at his announcement (Jewish Chronicle, 5/26/24).
Some editorial boards have been calling for an end to the butchery in Gaza (LA Times, 11/16/23; Boston Globe, 2/23/24). But there is still a loud, booming editorial voice that is in line with official thinking in Washington: There is no red line for Israel. Anything goes. No matter what atrocity it commits, editorialists will ignore it and proclaim Israel the victim.
The New York Times has become notorious for its role in laundering right-wing transphobia for its largely liberal audience (see, e.g., FAIR.org, 12/16/22, 5/11/23, 5/19/23). A recent article (5/20/24) about local school politics serves as yet another example of how the paper’s anti-trans agenda most likely flies under the radar of most readers—making its propaganda that much more effective.
The headline read, “NYC Parents Rebuked for Questioning Transgender Student-Athlete Rules.” The subhead explained further:
Over a dozen Democratic elected officials criticized a parent group that asked for a review of rules that let students play on sports teams that align with their gender identity.
It’s a framing clearly intended to portray the parents as reasonable—they just want to ask questions and review some rules!—and the city officials as censorious. After all, who rebukes people for just wanting to have a conversation?
‘Asked the city to review’
The New York Times (5/20/24) framed a story about a transphobic resolution as “parents” being attacked for merely “questioning.”
The article, by education reporter Troy Closson, began by describing “a group of elected parent leaders”–representing District 2, one of six Manhattan school districts–who “asked the city to review education department rules allowing transgender students to play on sports teams that align with their gender identity.”
“Elected,” so they must be representative, and simply “asked…to review,” so there’s presumably nothing anyone should get upset about. At least, as far as Times readers would be able to tell.
And what was the response? Closson tells readers:
The schools chancellor, David C. Banks, called the proposal “despicable” and “no way in line with our values.”
Democratic officials also have responded to the parent council swiftly, and angrily.
In a letter made public on Monday, a coalition of 18 Democratic elected officials from New York called the proposal “hateful, discriminatory and actively harmful” to the city’s children.
New York City’s Democrats sure sound extreme! Closson did finally give readers at least a glimpse of the other side’s perspective:
The officials argued that while some parents say they were “simply asking for a conversation,” the resolution “was based in anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric” that has helped fuel harassment and mental health issues for young people. They demanded that the council formally rescind the resolution.
Toward the end of the piece, Closson acknowledged that, according to another council member, the council “received dozens of messages in opposition and only a handful in support in the lead-up to their meeting on the resolution.”
Crossing ‘political lines’
The Times gave no further context about the resolution or the people behind it that could possibly make the officials’ reactions make sense.
Instead, to help readers understand how out of the mainstream those Democratic officials are, Closson wrote, “But opinions on this issue don’t necessarily break neatly along political lines.” He offered a poll of “registered voters statewide” that found about two-thirds support barring trans athletes from competing with others who share their gender identity, with Republican respondents 30 percentage points more supportive than Democrats.
Of course, New York state is far more conservative than New York City (5–4 Democrat to Republican statewide, versus about 7–1 in the city), so it’s not a very useful barometer of NYC public opinion.
But perhaps more importantly, is it really the opinions of ill-informed voters that should matter here? Or is it the safety and well-being of the city’s public school students?
Like most Times articles about trans politics that FAIR has analyzed (FAIR.org, 5/6/21, 6/23/22, 5/11/23), Closson’s piece marginalized the voices of those most impacted. The piece quoted no students; it quoted one trans person—an “educator who runs a local after-school program”—who opposed the resolution. The rest were officials and parent council members.
A pointless ‘review’
The New York Times didn’t mention that the rules the resolution called for “reviewing” in fact are required under state law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression (CNN, 5/11/24).
Reading about the incident in outlets focused on education news, you get a very different understanding of the situation—including what the resolution could do. And there’s much more backstory to these “concerned parents” than the Times lets on.
First of all, as ACLU lawyer (and trans parent in District 2) Chase Strangio pointed out at the meeting, New York City school guidelines on trans youth athletes already align with state law.
Indeed, when a Republican county executive tried to ban trans athletes from competing on women’s teams in nearby Nassau County, the state attorney general sent him a cease-and-desist letter for contravening New York’s law against gender identity discrimination. A state judge (CNN, 5/11/24) struck down the executive order shortly before the Times article on the school council resolution, suggesting that any sort of “review” of the city’s school anti-discrimination policy would likewise serve no purpose—other than scoring cheap political points by targeting a vulnerable student population.
That would be nothing new for some of the supposedly representative and reasonable leaders involved. For the real story here, you need a little bit of context about those leaders.
Community education councils in New York City, unlike school boards in many places, have no authority to change school policies; their resolutions are nonbinding and their role is advisory only. In part because of this—and because prior to 2021, council positions were filled by PTAs, not by popular vote—awareness of and participation in the elections are both extremely low, making them easy targets for small but organized activist groups. (In the 2021 elections, only 2% of eligible voters participated.)
Out of PLACE
PLACE co-founder Maud Maron (The City, 4/28/23) called New York City schools an “oppressor woke environment where DOE employees make them pledge allegiance to their LGBTQI+ religion.”
In New York, just such a group took advantage of that low-hanging fruit: PLACE NYC. Founded in 2019 to oppose city efforts to address some of the worst school segregation rates in the country by reforming screened admissions and gifted programs, PLACE-endorsed candidates won a whopping 40% of council seats in the 2023 elections (The City, 4/28/23).
PLACE does not advertise a particular stance on LGBTQ issues, but its leadership overlaps with other “parent rights” groups that take anti-trans positions, including the far-right Moms for Liberty.
The anti-trans resolution in New York City’s District 2 passed by 8 votes to 3. Of these eight concerned council members, seven were endorsed by PLACE in the 2023 elections, including three who are in leadership roles at the organization.
Leonard Silverman, president of the council, was quoted by the Times; it didn’t mention that he is also a founder of PLACE. PLACE treasurer Craig Slutkin was another “yes” vote.
Another founder (and former president) of PLACE, Maud Maron, sponsored the anti-trans resolution. Maron is a well-known local activist, a proud member of the Moms for Liberty who, in an unsuccessful long-shot bid for Congress last year, advocated for a trans youth athlete ban. Maron and fellow council and PLACE member Charles Love spoke at a recent Moms for Liberty panel (Chalkbeat, 1/18/24).
‘No such thing as trans kids’
A city councilmember characterized PLACE leaders’ private texts as “demeaning, transphobic smears that are reminiscent of playground bullies” (The74, 12/14/23).
Back in December, education news site The74 (12/14/23) reported on a leaked WhatsApp chat among Maron, fellow council and PLACE member Danyela Egorov and other parent leaders. In it, Maron declared that “there is no such thing as trans kids.” When a parent expressed concern about how many LGBTQ kids were in her child’s school, Maron responded, “The social contagion is undeniable.” She also falsely claimed of gender-affirming hormone therapy: “Some of these kids never develop adult genitalia and will never have full sexual function. It’s an abomination.”
Three months later, Maron called an anonymous high school student who penned a pro-Palestinian op-ed in their school paper a “coward,” and accused them of “Jew hatred” in the New York Post (2/24/24). After numerous parent and official complaints about her conduct, the NYC Department of Education (The74, 4/18/24) investigated and issued an order last month to Maron to
cease engaging in conduct involving derogatory or offensive comments about any New York City Public School student, and conduct that serves to harass, intimidate or threaten, including but not limited to frequent verbal abuse and unnecessary aggressive speech that serves to intimidate and cause others to have concern for their personal safety.
This very relevant context was reported just a few weeks before Closson’s Times article.
PLACE and its controversial members and history are well known among local education activists and reporters. So Closson, who specifically covers the Times‘ “K–12 schools in New York City” beat, would appear to be either remarkably uninformed about his beat or intentionally obscuring the background to his story.
‘An attempt to roll back protections’
Chalkbeat‘s report (4/23/24) put the focus on “protections for trans students,” not on “questioning” parents.
Meanwhile, Chalkbeat (4/23/24), which covers education news in a handful of large US cities, covered the council meeting with the headline “An Attempt to Roll Back Protections for Trans Students in Sports Angers NYC Students and Families.”
Unlike Closson, reporter Liz Rosenberg quoted a number of people directly impacted by the resolution: a local trans teen, a local seventh grader who had started a Gay/Straight Alliance, and a parent who had moved to New York from Florida to protect her young trans child from the anti-trans laws there.
Rosenberg explained Maron’s history, including the cease-and-desist letter she had received only a week before the meeting. She quoted experts who described the documented negative impacts on trans kids when exclusionary or restrictive anti-trans laws are enacted, including a sharp rise in K–12 hate crimes against LGBTQ students.
Over at The74 (3/22/24), Marianna McMurdock also provided the back story on Maron. She noted, as Closson did not, that “dozens of community members spoke out against the gender resolution with only one expressing support.” According to McMurdock, the messages received by the council about the resolution were even more lopsided than Closson reported: 173–2.
Where Closson wrote that it was “unclear…whether the issue has affected sports teams in the city,” but that “some parents worried that their children could be disadvantaged or injured if transgender girls joined girls’ teams,” even non-local outlet Politico (3/20/24) noted directly that there was no evidence that any cisgender girls in the district had been harmed by the city schools’ policy.
In other words, it’s not terribly difficult to provide the kind of context that helps readers understand what’s “true and important” about this story. But on trans issues, the New York Times has proven itself time and again less interested in what’s true and important than in acting as a trojan horse for organized right-wing transphobia.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
Janine Jackson interviewed historian Ellen Schrecker about the attack on academic freedom for the May 24, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Any accounting of the impact of Israel’s Gaza assault on scholarship, on learning, has to start with the reduction to rubble of all 12 universities in Gaza, with the incalculable loss that entails, and the reported killing of at least 90 professors. But as the Intercept’s Natasha Lennard writes:
Israel’s attempted eradication of intellectual life in Gaza echoes far beyond the territory, with US universities ensuring that some professors vocal in their support of Palestine can no longer do their jobs either.
We are now learning of how many academics and teachers around the country are seeing their jobs targeted as part of a purge, aggressively encouraged by funders and—mostly, but not only—Republican politicians.
It’s being called a new McCarthyism. But our guest, an expert on McCarthyism, suggests we understand other elements at play that make today different from, say, anti-Vietnam college protests in the 1960s, including the fact that today’s political repression aims not just at teachers themselves, but at what gets studied and taught.
Historian Ellen Schrecker is author of numerous books, including The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s; No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities; and she’s editor, with Valerie C. Johnson and Jennifer Ruth, of the new book The Right to Learn: Resisting the Ring-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, out now from Beacon Press. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Ellen Schrecker.
Ellen Schrecker: Thank you for having me on your program.
JJ: There are a number of differences between student (in particular) protests today, and that of the 1960s. For one thing, today’s student protesters remember previous student protesters, and their impact on history. And I would say, also, the availability today of more person-to-person information sources, avenues outside of “all the news that’s fit to print.” But you note that the playing field of the university, as a site, as a place for voicing dissent, is itself importantly different. Tell us about that.
ES: Yes, that’s really the key issue now. Every time there is an attempt to repress free speech and academic freedom, I’m always asked, how does this compare to McCarthyism? And I’m a trained historian, so I sort of put in a lot of nuance, and I’ll say, “Oh, it depends….” But I don’t do that anymore, because it’s worse than McCarthyism. Much worse.
And that is really because the university of 2024 is a very different place than the academic community in the late 1960s. In the 1960s, American universities were expanding. They had a great reputation. People loved them. State governments and the federal government were throwing money at the universities.
And that’s no longer the case. And what we’re seeing is a very much weaker system of American higher education than had existed during what was called the Golden Age of American higher education, in the late 1950s and 1960s.
So I’d like to talk about what has changed between that period and now, and why what’s happening today is so much worse.
When we look at McCarthyism itself—and up until recently, it was probably the longest-lasting and most widespread episode of political repression in the modern American university—what we saw was an attack on individual faculty members. It was part of a broader purge of left-wing scholars, movie stars, government officials. It was running throughout large sectors of American society, not specifically targeting the universities, but they probably accounted for a quarter or fifth, maybe, of the victims of McCarthyism, in the sense that these were the people who were losing their jobs as a result of the inquisition.
To my knowledge, there were about a hundred people, more or less—probably more, because people kept this stuff secret, so they could keep their jobs—who were fired. And they were fired specifically because they had had some kind of connection with the American Communist movement earlier in the 1930s and ’40s, and did not want to cooperate with the ongoing anti-Communist inquisition that we now call McCarthyism. (Although we should have called it Hooverism, if we really understood how it operated.)
But anyhow, what’s interesting, and what’s very different, of course, from today, is that these people were being fired for their external political activities, or former political activities, and were never questioned about their teaching or scholarship. That was simply not of interest. It was their political work, or former political work.
That’s not the case today. What is happening today is that there is a huge movement attacking all of American higher education. It’s been ongoing now for 40 years. It started as a response to the ’60s, to the student movement of the ’60s, to the originally nonviolent civil disobedience. These students were protesting, very much like students today, against what they saw as a dreadful moral calamity, a dreadful American participation in the Vietnam War. Certainly that was the main thing, but also, they were very involved with the movement for racial justice.
And as they tried to get some kind of action to end the war—which they actually did do, but it wasn’t obvious at the time—and trying to open up American society to racial equality, they became frustrated and noticed that their own institutions, universities, had been collaborating in some way with these injustices that they were seeking to rectify.
And so that’s why you get this sort of campus-focused movement on the part of students, because, after all, this was the only institution they could affect. They may not have been particularly realistic; in retrospect, maybe they should have emphasized electoral politics a lot more than they did, but that’s rewriting history. What we need to learn from history is the fact that as a result of the student unrest of the ’60s—which was essentially nonviolent on the part of the students, and only became particularly violent when universities and political bodies sought to repress it, just like today, of course—what we’re seeing on campuses is police violence; the kids have been remarkably restrained, much more so than in the ’60s, actually. They’re just sitting on the ground in their tents.
They’re not bothering anybody, except, of course: if you look at this from the perspective of 40 years of repression against higher education, that is in large part, not entirely by any means, but in large part the product of a very self-conscious conspiracy, and I don’t use the word “conspiracy” a lot, on the part of a group of very wealthy businessmen and intellectuals who were seeking, as early as the 1960s, to roll back the political reforms of the ’60s, and impose a more right-wing, neoliberal political culture on the United States, that contained, as one of its main focuses, an attack on higher education.
Because these wealthy conservatives felt that the kind of dispassionate and educated, evidence-based scholarship that was coming out of universities was attacking them, and they wanted to destroy the reputation of higher education. And they did so very self-consciously, by undermining the institutions of higher learning, by circulating propaganda about how universities have been taken over by left-wing professors, by—the word that they use today is “woke”—the forces of “woke” left-wing radicals, by weak-kneed administrators who are capitulating to these powerful forces.
Well, that wasn’t the case at all. What happened was universities themselves changed in response, not just to this attack, but also in response to a very strong economic pullback on the part of the state legislatures and the federal government that had been funding them so well up until the end of the ’60s.
So what we’re seeing is universities that then, for the past 40 years, have been responding to a very different financial economic situation, an economic climate that was punishing them, and they had to respond, administrators did, not by taking a more positive approach to what’s going on, and trying to sell what American higher education was doing for the country, for individuals, they thought to placate these forces of reaction.
But they also responded by seeking other sources of income, when state funding shrank, and that’s key. And what did they do? They raised tuition, slowly at first, but then quite significantly. So we now have, of course, the student debt problem, which I think it’s up to $1.8 trillion of student debt. And we have people being very upset about how much higher education costs, when in so many other countries, it seems to be free.
They also look for other sources of income: donors. The leaders of higher education began to curry favor with these very wealthy billionaires, many of whom were funding this attack on higher education. So we’re seeing that, and we’re also seeing universities themselves following a corporate agenda, on the assumption that this is what they can do to get favor with the new donors.
Ellen Schrecker: “Universities have also ignored their faculty members, and this is why they have put up, I think, such a pathetically weak and collaborationist response to the current repression.”
But also because they have imbibed the neoliberalism that came about beginning in the 1970s, and continuing through til today, whereby the public good sort of disappears from the agenda and it’s intensely individualistic. Even a higher education now is something that’s good for individual people, and its role as a benefit to the rest of society has long since disappeared, which is really a total travesty.
Anyhow, as a result, universities have also ignored their faculty members, and this is why they have put up, I think, such a pathetically weak and collaborationist response to the current repression.
The final point here is that the way that the universities have been weakened is by ignoring their faculty members, but also by destroying the faculty: Over the past 40 years or so, very gradually, the number of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members has declined to the extent that 75% of all instruction is now being offered by faculty members who have no academic freedom.
These are what we call contingent workers. They are part-time or contract temporary workers who have no academic freedom, no economic security. They can be fired at any time for any purpose or no purpose at all. And they are not in a position to fight back, and their administrations do not support them when they’re attacked from the outside.
They’re very good teachers. They’re equally qualified with the tenured and tenure-track faculty members, but have terrible salaries. They often are hired to teach one course for one semester for $3,000 or so, that’s the average pay, and can be fired at any time.
And I think we have to realize that this is a structural problem that needs to be addressed before we can really fight back and preserve the jobs of people who are now particularly threatened, especially after October 7, by another group, a very powerful political group of supporters of Israel.
JJ: The fact that, of the many professors who’ve been fired, only one of them, as far as we know right now, had tenure—it is the adjuncts, it is the people who are basically at-will workers who are easier to just be cut off by these universities. So part of it is, it is this structural thing where you undermine the very idea that as a professor you would have some kind of job security, you would have some kind of protection.
ES: Exactly. Yes.
JJ: Let me just say, we have seen a number of professors putting themselves, sometimes physically, between students and police. We have seen professors standing up for, not only their own rights to speak, but their students’ rights to protest. And I would just say, because we’ve talked about this before, that faculty/student support and coalition-building, that’s part of a tradition too.
ES: Exactly. And what we’re seeing, for the first time, really, since the 1960s, is faculties beginning to organize themselves in support of causes that many of us support. And that should be protected by the universities and has not been, because the administrations over the past 40 years have been seeking to curry favor with these right-wing billionaire donors, and have been living in a kind of right-wing bubble.
They don’t know students, they don’t care about students. What they care about is getting money, getting support, growing their institutions, growing them in a way that will appear on the US News & World Report status ranking, without really paying attention to the kind of education they’re giving their students.
And it’s been shown, there’s evidence that the predominance of these temporary and low-paid contingent workers are unable to give their students the kind of education they deserve. And that’s a very significant problem. But, together, what we’re seeing is a real beginning, however, of a new awareness that we’re all in this together.
I would argue that the most powerful way to fight against this probably is through unionization, through organizing unions that can get contracts that include language supporting academic freedom. That’s very important. That seems to be the only way that these gig, part-time and temporary professors can gain a measure of economic security, so that they can speak out and keep their jobs.
I mean, this is really destroying free speech within American society, because universities have traditionally been, and certainly at the moment still are, spaces where there is more support for intellectual freedom than anywhere else in American society.
So it’s very important that faculty members begin to fight back, begin to form coalitions, can begin to argue for a serious pushback against these forces that, as we know, have been passing laws, certainly since 2020, in red states and in some blue, to sanction free speech and ideas that the right-wing Republicans do not think are appropriate. And this is a terrible threat to our whole democratic system.
JJ: The book talks about how we can’t just rhetorically defend academic freedom and free speech; we have to act, and the book is part of that. So I would just ask you, finally, this new book, The Right to Learn, I want to say, it’s not a tome; it’s immensely readable. I just would ask you, what do you and other contributors hope that this book will do in the world? How do you look for it to be used?
ES: OK, we wrote this book more than two years ago, and I remember feeling it recently: “Oh my God, it’s out of date. How can it be used?” Well, it’s more relevant now than it was then. The situation has really worsened enormously since October 7.
What we were hoping to do is give people some intellectual ammunition, the facts about what’s going on on American campuses, and how people have been distorting history, have been distorting constitutional measures, have been distorting the function of academic freedom, and how people can fight back, give people information that they need, so that then they can go out and become active on their campuses, recruit colleagues, recruit students, start teach-ins, start doing whatever they can to create a buzz on their campuses, which certainly is happening.
But we’ve got to mobilize. We’ve got to organize. People have to have the information, and that’s what we felt was a necessary precursor for mounting a serious campaign to take back power on our campuses, to bring the faculty back into action as it has never been before. And we’re really asking for something very revolutionary, I guess.
What we’d like to see is a much more democratic university, that isn’t under the sway of these reactionary politicians and businessmen. And it’s going to be hard to do. It’s going to require a lot of action, but we want that action to be well-informed, and we hope that this book will be useful, be a weapon. It’s not going to save the world, obviously, but it’s our contribution to this campaign.
JJ: Thank you so much for that. We’ve been speaking with Ellen Schrecker, author of books, including The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom and the End of the American University. That’s available from the New Press. The new book we’re talking about is called The Right to Learn: Resisting the Ring-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom That’s out now from Beacon Press. Thank you so much, Ellen Schrecker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
CUED (5/15/24): “A large share of Amazon warehouse workers report facing financial strain, including difficulties meeting basic needs.”
A new report (5/15/24) from the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois/Chicago reflects the largest nationwide study of Amazon workers to date, some 1,500 Amazon workers across 451 facilities in 42 states. The big takeaway: Roughly half of Amazon’s frontline warehouse workers are struggling with food and housing insecurity, with a third relying on public assistance programs.
Now, the Washington Post, owned by Amazon chair Jeff Bezos, has heard of the Center. The paper quoted it in a 2022 piece (12/10/22) about robots that led with the news that “Amazon has robotic arms that can pick and sort cumbersome items like headphones or plushy toys.” Oh, and “other companies are making progress, too.”
And even in a 2020 piece (9/3/20) on how overworked and exhausted warehouse workers were “bracing for a frenzied holiday rush.” Though beleaguered Amazon workers came in at the end, after Kohl’s and Wayfair, Best Buy and Target and so on. Bezos’ paper allows some pointed criticism of Amazon; it’s just often in “opinion” pieces, like a 2020 oped from Alex Press (4/25/20).
So we’ll wait and see if the paper gives proper news coverage to what is incontrovertibly a news story: the clear association, as report co-author Beth Gutelius put it, between “the company’s health and safety issues, and experiences of economic insecurity among its workforce.”
Featured Image: Photo of Amazon warehouse worker from CUED report (5/15/24).
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.
Law enforcement at UCLA looks on as student peace protesters are attacked by a right-wing mob (CNN, 5/16/24).
This week on CounterSpin: As an historic catastrophe, the deep and myriad impacts of Israel’s assault on Palestinians will not be fully understood until years from now, if then. That only adds urgency to present-day resistance to the collateral assault—on the ability to witness, to record and to remember. And of course to protest. The violent, state-sponsored attacks on college students and faculty across the country, who are standing in solidarity with Palestinians and opposed to colleges’ investment in the war and occupation, are showcasing many things—among them the abandonment by many educational institutions of their responsibility to protect not only students, but the space in which they can speak and learn freely.
When we spoke with historian Ellen Schrecker in 2017, she noted that the power of the movement associated with Joseph McCarthy was not the man himself, but the “collaboration of the employers, of the mainstream media, of the legal system, you name it, to go along with this anti-Communist purge.” And while many people feel comforted that McCarthy the man was eventually censured by the Senate, the truth is “the American political spectrum narrowed [and] a whole bunch of ideas and causes kind of disappeared from American political discourse and American political life.”
We hear again today from historian and author Ellen Schrecker, co-editor of the new book The Right to Learn: Resisting the Ring-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, from Beacon Press.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Amazon.
Janine Jackson interviewed Voting Booth‘s Ian Vandewalker about small donors for the May 17, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: If you ask people to boil down what “democracy” means, many will say, “One person, one vote.” If powerful people, rich people, get more voice, it’s not democracy. Even as practices and policies have moved us materially further from that reality, that’s still the selling point. Even the reason the US can invade other places is they “don’t believe in democracy like we do.”
Now we see more and more people saying, “Well, democracy shouldn’t actually mean everyone gets equal voice (but we would like to keep using the label).” You can forgive a person for being a bit confused. And since courts have declared that money is speech, you can forgive a person for being more confused. That’s the landscape in which the latest fillip seems to be that people who give small amounts of money to political campaigns somehow have outsized voice?
Here to help us make sense of that is Ian Vandewalker. He’s senior counsel of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ian Vandewalker.
JJ: I will say, when I first saw the headline of your report, “Do Small Donors Cause Political Dysfunction?,” I thought, “Huh? Who would say that?” It turns out it’s a number of folks, including author and New York Times writer Thomas Edsall, who wrote, “For $200, a Person Can Fuel the Decline of Our Major Parties.” And then David Byler at the Washington Postwrote, “Small-Dollar Donors Didn’t Save Democracy. They Made It Worse.” So this is not like a subreddit, obscure line of thought. Before I ask you to engage it, putting the best face on it, what is the argument here?
IV: The argument is this contrarian line that you think small donors are democratizing, because anybody can be one. But if you look at who gets a lot of small money, it tends to be people who engage in disruptive antics, like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz—people who try to attract a lot of attention with extremist or polarizing rhetoric. And so the argument is, what small donors are really doing is encouraging these people who are showboating, and not engaged in serious moderation or governance.
JJ: So the idea, though, is it that these small donors aren’t real, that they’re kind of orchestrated? That these folks are trying to get folks to just give $12 to make some kind of point? And it’s not that actually it’s people who can only give $12?
IV: Right, I mean, I think there’s something here in that the media ecosystem that we live in, both the mainstream media and social media clickbait, does gravitate towards outrage and controversy and people screaming at each other. We all get these fundraising emails with all caps: “The world’s going to come crashing down if you don’t send me $12.”
So I think there are incentives in the media system that say to certain people, “I can engage a national small-donor fundraising base by saying crazy things.” That exists. Now, one of the critiques is that most small donors don’t actually respond to that. Small donors tend to give to competitive races where they think they can help their party win control of a chamber of Congress or the White House.
JJ: So first of all, I like how you go right to the media ecosystem. I think a lot of folks go, “Well, there’s a political system and there’s a media system, and they’re different.” You’re already saying, “No, these things are intimately integrated.”
IV: Yes, campaign fundraising doesn’t happen in a vacuum. And, look, the internet has been a huge beneficial force for fundraising and allows people to connect across the nation to things that they believe in. But one of the other effects of that has been this clickbait world of, say the most outrageous thing in order to get the clicks and get the small-dollar fundraising.
There’s a question whether these candidates that engage in this kind of extremist rhetoric, are they doing it for the small-dollar fundraising, or would they be doing it anyway, given who votes in their district?—I think is a question we should also look into.
JJ: There is a reality, there is a foot we can keep on base. And so what do you say in this piece about, when you actually investigate, are small donors causing political dysfunction? What did you find?
Ian Vandewalker: “Even though the amount of small money in the system has dramatically increased, the money from the biggest donors…has increased even faster.”
IV: So first of all, there’s lots of reasons for polarization, people moving farther to the right and left and other kinds of dysfunction. They have to do with gerrymandering and the media ecosystem and the parties making strategic choices about how they’re going to engage their voter bases, and things that have nothing to do with campaign finance.
As I said, small donors, they give to people they’ve heard of, so one way to get heard of is to say crazy things, but it’s certainly not the only way. Some candidates are trying to find policy solutions to the problems that face us. And the other thing we haven’t mentioned yet is big donors. Even though the amount of small money in the system has dramatically increased, the money from the biggest donors, people who give millions, 10 millions, has increased even faster. So that’s actually the biggest part of the campaign finance system, is the big money, and those people give to extremists as well.
So it’s hard to say, when you look at all those facts together, that small donors are causing dysfunction or polarization, even though there are these notorious examples of extremists who raise lots of small money.
JJ: It just sounds weird to say that people who can give less, people who don’t have a million dollars, their throwing in their money wherever they throw it is throwing off the system. It makes you ask, “Well, what’s the system?” Is the system that only people who can afford to give tens of thousands of dollars should be included? It just sounds weird.
IV: Yeah, that’s right. I think one of the things, the sort of thought experiments I like to do with these arguments is, well, replace small donor with voter, right? If small donors give a lot of money to a candidate because they believe in that candidate, OK, that’s just like voters voting for a candidate because they believe in that candidate. And it’s hard to say that that’s, as you say, a problem with the system itself.
JJ: Obviously, every election year is important, but hoo boy, 2024. Thoughts for reporters who are going to be engaging this?
IV: Yeah, I think for reporters it’s important to get away from the high profile anecdotes. It’s easy to say, “Oh, Marjorie Taylor Green raised a bunch of small money,” but there’s data out there that can show you, what are small donors actually doing across the entire system. And that’s a very different story.
And as for reforms, the Brennan Center supports a small-donor public financing system that matches small donations. So it amplifies those amounts from regular people, to make them competitive with the big donors. And that changes the way the candidates fundraise, and makes them fundraise by essentially asking people in their communities for votes. And so it amplifies those regular people’s voices, and engages a kind of connection between elected representative and constituent that’s good for representative democracy, because politicians are listening to the voters in another way.
JJ: All right, then, and we’ll have another conversation about the role of money in politics generally, and why do you have to have money to participate? That’s a whole bigger conversation.
IV: Yes, definitely. There’s a lot to say about the uniquely American way of running politics with private dollars and the biggest donors calling the tune.
JJ: All right, then. Well, for now, we’ve been speaking with Ian Vandewalker. He’s senior counsel of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Thank you so much, Ian Vandewalker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
After pro-Israel billionaires and millionaires met with Eric Adams, one attendee summarized “items ‘discussed today,’ including donating to Adams, using group members’ ‘leverage’ to help persuade Columbia’s president to let New York police back on campus, and paying for ‘investigative efforts’ to assist the city.” (Washington Post, 5/16/24)
An exposé by the Washington Post (5/16/24) showed the degree to which wealthy pro-Israel businesspeople coordinated with each other to pressure New York City Mayor Eric Adams to take drastic action against college campus protests against the genocide of Palestinians. It’s a remarkable piece of reporting, by Hannah Natanson and Emmanuel Felton, that points to a pervasive problem in American politics: that the wealthy enjoy outsized influence with the political class, while the rest of us drift in the wind.
The story is based on transcripts of a WhatsApp groupchat called “Israel Current Events,” whose participants included “billionaires and business titans.” One message by a billionaire’s staffer “told the others the goal of the group was to ‘change the narrative’ in favor of Israel,” the Post reported. A person identified only as “a staffer” told the group, “While Israel worked to ‘win the physical war,’ the chat group’s members would ‘help win the war’ of US public opinion by funding an information campaign against Hamas.” The article reported that the chats revealed collaboration with Adams:
“He’s open to any ideas we have,” chat member [Joseph] Sitt, founder of the retail chain Ashley Stewart and the global real estate company Thor Equities, wrote April 27, the day after the group’s Zoom call with Adams. “As you saw he’s OK if we hire private investigators to then have his police force intel team work with them.”
The piece revealed that groupchat members, aware that “Columbia had to grant Adams permission before he could send city police to the campus,” strategized about how to apply the group’s “leverage” to Columbia president Minouche Shafik, including contacting the university’s board of trustees.
‘An all-too-familiar trope’
The New York Post (5/17/24)—which regularly accuses George Soros of being the puppet master behind all progressive causes—attacked the Washington Post: “Intimating that a mainly Jewish bunch of wealthy power-players were quietly pulling a politician’s strings is a classic trope of Jew-hate.”
Needless to say, City Hall wasn’t too happy about the piece. One of the mayor’s deputies, Fabien Levy, quickly responded on Twitter (5/16/24) that “the insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all-too-familiar antisemitic trope.”
His multi-post thread concluded:
@WashingtonPost & others can make editorial decisions to disagree with the decisions by universities to ask the NYPD to clear unlawful encampments on campuses, but saying Jews “wielded their money and power in an effort to shape American views” is offensive on so many levels.
The Washington Post, of course, did not report that “Jews” had “wielded their money and power”—but that “some prominent individuals” had, distinguished not by religion or ethnicity, but by their politics.
The mayor himself called the story “antisemitic in its core” (Good Day New York, 5/20/24) and doubled down on this point when speaking to reporters (New York Post, 5/21/24). The Anti-Defamation League (Twitter, 5/20/24) said that the Washington Post should be
ashamed of publishing an article that unabashedly (and almost entirely on anonymous sources) plays into antisemitic tropes by inferring a secret cabal of Jews is using wealth & power to influence governments, the media, the business world & academia.
The Adams administration’s effort to redirect scrutiny away from the latest credible charge of coziness with wealthy donors found a friendly audience in right-wing media. Fox News (5/17/24) gave Levy’s claims headline status, and the New York Post editorial board (5/17/24) said that the Adams administration “smells a whiff of antisemitism in the WaPo report,” because “intimating that a mainly Jewish bunch of wealthy power-players were quietly pulling a politician’s strings is a classic trope of Jew-hate.” Yes, that’s the same New YorkPost that obsessively ties every political cause to the left of Emperor Palpatine to the Jewish philanthropist George Soros (e.g., 8/1/22, 1/22/23, 1/25/23, 7/24/23, 12/9/23, 4/26/24, 4/26/24). It is also interesting to note that two Rupert Murdoch outlets, thought to be Republican stalwarts, are once again acting as in-kind public relations agents for a Democratic mayor, a testament to Adams’ right-wing agenda—the New York Post endorsed him (5/20/21) and continues to cheerlead for him (1/27/24) as he approaches the end of his first term. For the Murdoch empire, politics (including shielding Israel) sometimes comes before party.
ABC (4/24/24) reported that at Passover Seders celebrated in campus antiwar encampments, “some set aside an empty seat at the Seder table for hostages abducted from Israel on October 7, when Hamas launched a surprise terror attack. Others put an olive on the Seder plate to recognize solidarity with Palestinians.”
A tired accusation
The accusation that the student protest movement against the genocide of Palestinians is “antisemitic” has become more and more tired. Many Jews are mobilizing in these protests (ABC, 4/24/24). As a result, many Jewish protesters face state violence (Al Jazeera, 5/3/24) and censorship (FAIR.org, 12/15/23) for speaking out against the Israeli military. Yet the Adams administration, Fox and the New York Post continue to hurl the insult, this time at the Washington Post, signaling that they have no more honest way to defend the behavior exposed by the Post. It would be just as ridiculous to claim that Jeff Sharlet’s reporting (Washington Post, 8/16/19) on the influence of Christian lobbying in Washington is anti-Christian, or investigations into the millions of dollars Saudi Arabia spends in the US to sanitize its image (Guardian, 12/22/22) are anti-Muslim. Federal investigators are probing Adams’ financial relationship with Turkey (Politico, 12/22/23; New York Times, 5/20/24), and there’s been no serious discourse that the scrutiny is somehow anti-Muslim. Is reporting on the growing influence of the Indian BJP and the Indian nationalist government in Washington (Intercept, 3/16/20; Jacobin, 3/4/23) anti-Hindu? When we talk about the Israel lobby, we don’t even necessarily mean Jewish advocates; that lobby consists heavily of right-wing evangelical Christians (Jerusalem Post, 1/27/24). Ken Griffin, the hedge fund billionaire who announced he wouldn’t hire Harvard grads who signed a letter critical of Israel (New York Post, 10/16/23), is Presbyterian. The arms industry supports Israel as well, strictly from the profit potential of protracted violence in the Middle East (Reuters, 10/16/23). Establishment attacks on outlets that expose corruption are evidence of good journalism (FAIR.org, 6/17/21, 1/12/24, 2/2/24). Such attacks are meant to stifle the press, and keep them from being a check on power. In this case, they are meant to shut down dissent against the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
False charges of antisemitism have been an effective tool for the right in the past (FAIR.org, 8/26/20). The good news is that this may be starting to change.
Janine Jackson interviewed Voting Booth‘s Steven Rosenfeld about election transparency for the May 17, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Voting Booth (5/9/24) has investigated Trump loyalists’ election denial strategies.
Janine Jackson: The Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump has proven surprisingly tenacious, perhaps, in part, because it is so big and vague, and perhaps, in part, due to a corporate press corps that are constitutionally incapable of saying sometimes there are not two sides with the truth in the middle.
Based on the tenacity and the utility of that lie, Trumpists are continuing the work of undermining US electoral processes in the run up to the 2024 race. Besides saying, “Trump! Am I right?” is there more we might do to break through the disinformation and gird ourselves for similar future efforts?
Steven Rosenfeld reports on transparency and other electoral issues for VotingBooth.media. He joins us now by phone from California. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Steven Rosenfeld.
Steven Rosenfeld: Well, I’m delighted to be here. Thank you.
JJ: I want to ask you about the Election Education channel that you’ve written about, but first, just some context. Even if you don’t think anyone’s going to go back and say Trump actually won, there is a possibility of creating enough chaos, confusion and controversy around elections that people can say, “Well, I don’t know what went on, so I’ll believe who I want to believe.” Trumpists don’t have to convince you of the Big Lie if they sow enough doubt. That’s kind of the playing field we’re on.
SR: Well, that is true. If you think about what happened since 2020, there were 60-something lawsuits, election challenges filed after election day by Trump and his allies in the Republican party and other nonprofits that are aligned with Republicans. Courts, unlike state legislatures and political campaigns, actually have rules of evidence. You’re not allowed to lie in court. If you go into court and you present lies and you can’t back things up with evidence or facts that can be duplicated by somebody else, you’ll lose your law license, and that’s what’s happened with Rudy Giuliani and a whole bunch of others.
But winning in the court of legal opinion is not the same as winning in the court of public opinion. So what’s happened since 2020 is these legislators in states like Arizona and other places have created these audits and these investigations where the goal, really, was not to prove that Trump won, but it was to get on the news week after week and month after month, especially on the television channels and the online platforms that are favored by the Trump supporters and right wingers, and just plant those seeds of doubt.
Steven Rosenfeld: “The goal, really, was not to prove that Trump won, but it was to get on the news week after week and month after month…and just plant those seeds of doubt.”
They have people on these channels and they talk about technical things that no one could understand, but people would just nod and go “Okay, okay,” and so what you ended up getting was you can win in court but lose in the court of public opinion. So these folks have basically been winning the propaganda war, and they’ve been doing it just as you said, by planting seeds of doubt and basically saying political tribal loyalties, “How could that possibly happen?” All this kind of stuff. And that’s brought us to today.
JJ: It’s a particular example, it’s not a sole example, but it is a kind of epicenter of this kind of thing: You looked at the Election Education channel on Telegram. Tell us a little about what that is and what they are up to that is currently and potentially meaningful.
SR: When I was on the floor of the Arizona recount, which was in an old basketball arena in Phoenix, this was run by the Cyber Ninjas, and the state senate in that state said we’re going to take possession of all the ballots in Maricopa County, which is, I forget, second or third largest jurisdiction in the country. So, 1.2 million ballots. They had a lot of volunteers come in who were basically patriotic citizens who thought, “My God, something went wrong. I gotta do something to help figure out what happened.”
So a lot of these folks are emblematic of the grassroots wing of the “election integrity movement” or the pro-Trump part of the Republican party. They call themselves an election integrity movement. They went to other platforms like Parler and Telegram, and they stayed in touch there.
Now, this is not the same as the people who have really tried to become professional agitators, the people like Mike Lindell and others who’ve gone around the country speaking at Republican Party county meetings and have basically turned their livelihoods into holding forth with all these conspiracies that were based on things they claimed were happening and couldn’t be proven and “invisible hidden hands” and “the world’s out to get us” kind of stuff. And I’m not making any of this up. I won’t get into the details. The point is the details are really hard to follow, but people just nod and go along.
But below that, to answer your question, is on these pro-Trump, right of center social media platforms, you have these channels. They’re sort of pages where people share information and they talk and they communicate and they have a community there. And I would periodically go and see what these folks are saying. And I found this one channel on Telegram, which is one of the platforms, and it’s called the Election Education channel, and it’s run by a woman who is based in Washington state, and she is different than the folks who are in Trump’s immediate orbit. Because the folks in Trump’s immediate orbit will say—there’ll be a lot of cliches: “It was stolen.” “It was electronically hacked.” “Oh, they’re fabricating voters.” “Oh, they’re making up voter lists.” “Oh, they’re stealing ballots.”
These folks instead, at this Election Education channel, they decided to try to learn about the way elections work. And what I mean by that is there are a lot of subsystems and steps with a lot of bureaucratic and technical procedures that really follow the start to the finish of elections. So the whole voter registration system has its own rules and its own data, and then the whole ballot counting system, the vote counting system, is another set of computers and analytics and records and data. So they’ve discovered this and what they’ve tried to do is they’ve tried to teach themselves about it because they don’t trust talking to election officials and election officials most often don’t really want to talk to them or they lose patience.
So what’s happened is these folks, especially on this Election Education channel, I found more than a hundred really pretty well done graphics. It’s not like a bumper sticker, but they’re charts that can be read in five or ten seconds, and they have identified all these little steps and technicalities of running elections, and everywhere possible, they’ve tried to figure out, “How can this be used against us?”
So they’re emblematic of the phrase or cliche that a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, because they’re starting with something that’s factual and they just spin off the deep end. And they come from this mindset, “Well, anything that can be done against us will be done against us. And if anything is possible, it means it probably is happening somewhere. And even if people are trying to operate in good faith, like poll workers, they don’t know what’s happening invisibly inside their machines.” And they just go on and on this way.
And this is really different from the people surrounding Trump at the end of 2020 because they’re not just targeting the candidate, they’re targeting the system. When things get close in the fall, if they are close, it’s going to be a zillion targets.
JJ: So they’ve identified, they’ve broken down the different steps in the election process, and they’re saying, every step of the way, there can be subterfuge.
The Atlanta Voice (5/7/24) on new restrictive voter registration laws in Georgia: “The victory is sweet especially for some that believe the 2020 Presidential election was ‘stolen’.”
SR: Let’s just put this in the context of what you’re hearing about right now. So in early May, the governor of Georgia signed a bill that allows mass election challenges or challenges of voter registrations. And this had been in law before, and literally less than 10 people in 2020 tried to challenge the voter registrations of over a hundred thousand voters who obviously predominantly lived in the democratic epicenters, the blue cities, lower income communities, college campuses and things like that.
So the governor signed a bill allowing this to actually be expanded six months from now towards the ’24 presidential election in November. What you have in these narratives as a backdrop to what you read on the Trump social media channels is, “The Democrats are fabricating voters. The voter lists are actually not up to date, and that’s on purpose, because what they’re doing is they’re finding people who are not voting and they’re filling out ballots in their names, and they’re doing this electronically, and they’re doing this with mailed out ballots, and they’re doing it on Election Day so that when they find out that people haven’t come in, they can just push through five or ten thousand votes as needed, and this is how they’re going to screw us.”
And that level of paranoia—I could tell you practically why that is very unlikely, because there are too many other checks and balances in the actual data and records to get away with something like that where it wouldn’t be caught very early and immediately and quarantined and found and fixed and corrected. But the point, what I’m saying is, this is the rhetoric and the crazy-making around just this one little step at the start of the process.
So what people in the mainstream media and in election defense circles have not acknowledged is this same level of focus and what I would call craziness or paranoia, they’ve got scripts or scenarios every step of the way through the final certification, which comes weeks after Election Day. They don’t trust the machines, or they don’t trust the testing. They don’t trust how ballots might be delivered from a voting site to a counting center. I mean, it just goes on and on and on and on.
They don’t know what they don’t know. So what do I mean by that? They do not know, or they never say, what security measures might be in place to quarantine problems. They don’t know what other data or records occur upstream might be used to double check and say, “Wait a second, this isn’t right. It doesn’t match.” They don’t know, and they never say, what is the scale of proposed impacts here, are we talking about ten or a hundred or a thousand votes?
So it becomes this crazy-making, spinning kind of mindset that will never be satisfied. And even if you respond to one thing, there’s always going to be something else. It’s always going to be a “What about this?” and “What about that?”
JJ: Well, I want to say a few things—that you’ve actually said, but just to lift them up—for one thing, to show that it’s a rhetorical kind of thing, these folks are not saying, “If you did this, then I would believe that the process was clean.” They’re not offering solutions, they’re not offering things that might be done to be introduced in the process, and then we would accept the results. They are emphatically not doing that.
And then let me just tack onto that, you have written, actually, voting systems are not black boxes; there is data, there is ballot-centered evidence that can be verified. So it’s two things; it’s both, there are things that we can use to check and to make these processes transparent, and also, they don’t want to do that. They don’t want agreed-upon, evidentiary-based things that we can all see and say, “All right, this actually went according to rules.”
SR: That’s exactly right. For example, the attorney general’s race in Arizona, after the official result was in, there was a several hundred-vote margin, which means it went to an official recount. It turned out that in one county they didn’t count 500 votes, 500 ballots. And people knew what to look for to basically make sure that the number of voters equals the number of ballots. Very early on they would’ve seen there was an inventory problem, there was a mismatch. But instead it took nine weeks, nearly. It was late December before that recount was over. And in that nine week period, you can just imagine the volume of partisan propaganda that occurred.
So what’s happening is these folks, they’re learning about how elections work, they don’t know, or they didn’t know then, where to look to basically solve the most basic questions. Does the number of ballots equal the number of voters? And then you can drill down. You can make sure that the votes on each ballot, if they’re not totally sloppy, match what’s in the final spreadsheet. And if you want to argue about the sloppy ballots, you can find them very quickly. That’s what lawyers argue over in recounts, “Do I have a vote? Is it for my candidate or the other candidate or neither of us?” And they don’t do any of that.
JJ: Well, finally, I know that you have heard, “Let’s just not talk about these people. That only elevates them, that only spotlights them.” And I guess I see what people are saying? But at the same time, Trump won in 2016, he became the freaking president based on all manner of nonsense and straight up lying. And so I don’t know what we get from ignoring that, but we should certainly come at it smarter.
And so I want to ask you, what would you be asking from reporters? And I want to say, especially at the local level—you know, we can get big chin-scratching ideas pieces in the national media, but local reporting on the election is going to be really meaningful. “What happened here? What actually happened?”
What role do you see for reporters who aren’t, like you, specifically dedicated to issues of electoral processes and transparency, but they’re going to be the ones that we look to for reporting claims of fraud or claims of poll worker bias and so on in November. What would you like to put in reporters’ minds, maybe?
The Detroit Free Press (11/5/20) debunked a widely-shared Trumpist claim that late-arriving ballots were smuggled into a Detroit counting center.
SR: Well, I can tell you very simply, most local reporters, and this is also true of the people who come to observe elections, they don’t know what they’re seeing. They’re standing behind a stanchion or at a distance and they don’t really know what people are looking at as they’re shuffling ballot return envelopes or ballots, or looking at a computer screen to check signatures or something else.
What I would hope is that people who actually know the way things work could do some proactive education to tell journalists who are going to be covering the swing counties and the swing states to literally help them understand what they are seeing as the process inches forward. It’s not hard to do if you know what to look for.
There aren’t that many key decision points, and at least at that point, at the very worst, if the counting takes days or weeks, and the editors are saying, “I need a story by five o’clock, what are you going to do? What do you got?” At least then, you will actually be covering what’s real instead of covering the made-up crazy things, like “The ballots are being smuggled in the next room.” At least it could come back to what’s real, as opposed to what’s made up. And I think that’s the best we can hope for, is to try to nip the disinformation rumors in the bud. And that’s where they’ll start, in these swing counties, in these swing states, with these local reporters and local influences.
JJ: Alright, then we’ll end it there for now. We’ve been speaking with Steven Rosenfeld. You can find his piece, “Trump Loyalists Preview Strategies to Upend 2024 Election,” online at VotingBooth.media. Steven Rosenfeld, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
NOAA (4/15/24) found temperature levels in every ocean high enough to cause coral bleaching.
Record levels of heat in the ocean are causing once-colorful coral reefs around the world to bleach a ghostly white. In April, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced the planet’s fourth mass coral-bleaching event on record—the second in the last decade.
While they might look like plants, corals are actually invertebrate animals related to jellyfish. They get their vibrant colors from tiny algae that live on them and provide them with food. But when ocean temperatures become too hot, corals get stressed and expel the algae, losing their food source and color. Starving coral can recover if their environments improve, but the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that even with the Paris Agreement’s allotted warming of 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels, 70–90% of the world’s coral reefs will still die.
Because coral reefs provide such vibrant ecosystems for sea life, mass coral death will impact economies and food security for humans as well. By protecting coasts, sustaining fisheries, generating tourism and creating jobs, it is estimated that coral reefs provide ecosystem services worth trillions of dollars each year (MIT Science Policy Review, 8/20/20; GCRMN, 10/5/21).
ABC News (7/25/23) reported last year that “ocean temperatures have a strong connection to climate change”—but didn’t mention what climate change is connected to.
In the past year alone, we’ve seen staggering and unprecedented ocean temperatures amid widespread heatwaves. Last summer, water temperatures of more than 100°F were recorded off the coast of Florida (ABC, 7/25/23). Scientists say the El Niño weather phenomenon, solar activity and a massive underwater volcanic eruption have played a role in recent supercharged ocean temperatures, but the biggest cause of this coral crisis is undisputed: climate change. The IPCC reports that it’s “virtually certain” ocean temperatures have risen unabated since 1970, absorbing more than 90% of excess heat from the climate system. We also know that the burning of fossil fuels changes the climate more than any other human activity does.
Therefore, in order to give the public the most complete understanding of what’s going on—and how we can fix it—reporting on coral bleaching should not only link the phenomenon to climate change, but link climate change to its main culprit: the fossil fuel industry. While much reporting deserves credit for clearly making this connection, some reports from major outlets were still behind, implying the climate crisis might be some sort of act of God, rather than something humans have caused—and have the power to mitigate.
Good news about bad news
Coral bleaching is bad news, but I’d like to take a rare moment to highlight the good news, too: A lot of reporting on this crisis was thorough, setting a solid example of how the increasing number of climate change-related phenomena should be reported on.
Vox (4/26/24) spells it out: “Ultimately, the only real solution is reducing carbon emissions. Period.”
Vox (4/26/24) dedicated a whole piece to climate change’s effects on coral, making that fossil fuel connection. Senior environmental reporter Benji Jones wrote:
Ultimately, the only real solution is reducing carbon emissions. Period. Pretty much every marine scientist I’ve talked to agrees. “Without international cooperation to break our dependence on fossil fuels, coral bleaching events are only going to continue to increase in severity and frequency,” [NOAA marine scientist Derek] Manzello said.
The New York Times (4/15/24) made the fossil fuel connection, too, in an article by Catrin Einhorn: “Despite decades of warnings from scientists and pledges from leaders, nations are burning more fossil fuels than ever and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.”
NPR dedicated an episode of All Things Considered (4/17/24) to scientists’ work to breed heat-tolerant corals and algae, in hopes that they can help restore reefs. The piece, by Lauren Sommer and Ryan Kellman, outlined this work’s promise—and its limitations. Heat-tolerant algae may not share as many nutrients with the coral, potentially causing the coral to grow more slowly and reproduce later. Regulators will need to assess whether these lab-grown corals are safe for wild populations and their ecosystems as a whole. Logistically, the sheer amount of heat-tolerant coral needed to replace affected reefs is vast, and it’s only a temporary solution.
“It’s not our ‘get out of jail free’ card,” said Australian coral biologist Kate Quigley:
Maybe that gets us to 2030, 2050, for a very few number of species that we can work with. If we don’t have an ocean to put them back in that’s healthy, no amount of incredible technology or money is worth it.
The episode ended with an acknowledgment that these scientific mitigations are meant only to buy time while humans work to halt climate change, which will require “cutting heat-trapping emissions from the largest source—burning fossil fuels—and switching to alternative energy sources like solar and wind.”
All Things Considered’s coverage of the scientists’ work was impactful because it took time to explain that creating these heat-tolerant corals was an important mitigation, but that the ultimate solution is to cut fossil fuels. Without the latter, the former would be in vain.
Capable of accountability
As a media critic for an organization that’s been at this since 1986, to me it’s heartening when news outlets’ work actually improves. It’s definitely not yet time to pop the champagne—there’s still a chronic lack of clear reporting linking climate disasters to fossil fuels, as FAIR has noted in coverage of last year’s wildfires (7/18/23, 8/25/23), climate protests (9/29/23), the potential breakdown of a crucial Atlantic current (7/31/23), overstating the potential of new carbon-capture technology (1/4/24) and more. But these few coral-focused pieces offer hope that some outlets might be improving their climate reporting practices to include accountability. At the very least, it proves they are certainly capable.
Aside from the effects of the climate crisis becoming harder and harder to ignore each year, there is a commendable movement to train journalists on how best to report on climate through a number of initiatives and organizations. There’s a lot of work to do, but these stories indicate progress since Big Media was applauding Big Oil’s efforts to clean up the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 (Extra!, 3–4/90) and giving platforms to “scientists” on Big Oil’s payroll who asserted climate change was not occurring (Extra!, 11–12/04, 5–6/07).
The new denial
CNN (5/9/24) waited until the the 24th paragraph (out of 24) to tell readers that we “need to curb climate-warming carbon emissions.”
Climate denial today is more nefarious. Due to the unanimity and widespread knowledge of the scientific consensus, respectable outlets can no longer parrot views that the Earth isn’t warming. What they can do is bury or gloss over information on its primary cause, who profits off of it, and what needs to be done to prevent it from getting much worse.
In a piece on the potential of artificial reefs to mitigate this crisis that linked coral bleaching to climate change, CNN‘s Michelle Cohan (5/9/24) waited until the very last paragraph to mention the need to “curb climate-warming carbon emissions.” There’s nothing untrue about that statement, but it doesn’t tell you where those emissions come from, and leaves open the interpretation that “curbing” emissions can come from carbon capture and storage—a strategy that is largely industry greenwashing (FAIR.org, 1/4/24).
Despite likely short-form word limits, a solutions-oriented piece like this does a disservice to readers—and the scientists working on saving corals—by giving such an incomplete sketch of the necessary long-term change. It would benefit from a clear explanation that a) we need to phase out fossil fuels and b) alternative energy sources already exist, are reliable, and are more affordable than fossil fuels already. It’s not arduous or wordy to do so. All Things Considered did most of it in one sentence.
An ABC piece (4/15/24) by Leah Sarnoff and Daniel Manzo covered the coral-bleaching event, but only mentioned climate change in passing toward the end. Otherwise, “warming oceans” were just depicted as something that happened, with no clear connection or cause.
In an article expressing the dire condition of the reefs, the Washington Post‘s Rachel Pannett (4/18/24) likewise made the link to climate change only once: “Climate change is the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef, and coral reefs globally,” said Roger Beeden, the chief scientist of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. There was another quote from a research director with the Australian nonprofit Climate Council, who merely noted that the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef is “a disaster at our doorstep.”
It’s important to express the dire condition the reefs are in, and the devastating risks it poses to ocean and human life. But by only mentioning “climate change” in passing, and not discussing its causes, it comes across as a natural but unfortunate phenomenon. Not highlighting its causes means not highlighting its solutions, either. The result is a potentially paralyzing doomsday narrative that is more likely to dampen than galvanize necessary climate action—especially against fossil fuels.
‘Heat stress’
The word “climate” never appears in this Washington Post piece (4/15/24).
Another Washington Post piece (4/15/24), by Amudalat Ajasa, mentioned the “heat stress” on corals, but not even climate change, let alone the culpability of fossil fuels. This piece quoted NOAA’s Manzello, saying that this global event should be a wake-up call, but didn’t elaborate on what that wake-up call would be for. Wake up to do what? This piece didn’t explain.
The piece also took a grave tone, describing the ghastly reefs off the coast of Florida, Australia and the Caribbean island of Bonaire. It quoted Francesca Virdis, a chief operating officer at Reef Renewal Bonaire: “It’s hard to find a silver lining or a positive note with everything happening.”
The article explained the role of El Niño—a naturally occurring climate pattern that warms areas of the Pacific every 2–7 years—and the hope that it will soon let up and give way to La Niña, its cooler counterpart, but did not explain that the phenomenon plays a smaller role than ongoing, human-caused warming. The aforementioned Vox piece also discussed the role of El Niño, but was sure to specify that reefs have been collapsing long before this current crisis.
The feeling of alarm is justified, but journalists should remind readers that the coral bleaching crisis—and climate change as a whole—are not totally uncontrollable acts of nature. We know what is to blame. While it may be too late to avoid breaching the 1.5°C limit even if we cut emissions tomorrow, the sooner we cease burning fossil fuels, the more catastrophic impacts we’ll avoid.
The message is urgent and dire, but there’s plenty that humans—especially those in power—can do, and there’s plenty journalists can do to make the public aware.
FEATURED IMAGE: NOAA photos of a coral before and after bleaching. (This particular coral recovered from the event.)
This week on CounterSpin: You and I may know that the 2020 election was not stolen from Donald Trump through various mysterious sorts of skullduggery. That does not mean that we can whistle past the fact that many people who vote do believe that. Many of those people are activated in a way that goes beyond easily ignorable segments on OAN, and has meaning for November. Steven Rosenfeld reports on transparency, among other electoral issues, for Voting Booth. We’ll hear from him about kinds of election interference we ignore at our peril.
Also on the show: You and I may believe that democracy means, at its core, something like “one person, one vote.” That doesn’t mean we can whistle past the fact that many voting people do not believe that. Indeed, some elite media–designated smart people have determined: “Citizens United, what? It’s folks who give ten bucks to a candidate that are really messing up the system.” We’ll explore that notion with Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel for the Elections & Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn says “good media” (by which he most certainly means the New York Times) is a “pillar of democracy.” Talking to Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of the Semafor news site (5/5/24), Kahn elaborated:
One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters.
By way of explaining “the essential role of quality media in informing people about their choice in a presidential election,” Kahn summed up how he sees the Times covering Campaign 2024:
It is true that Biden’s agenda is more in sync with traditional establishment parties and candidates. And we’re reporting on that and making it very clear.
I put it to you that presenting that as the first thing to say about the election—which candidate is more pro-establishment?—is both a peculiar view of what’s at stake in 2024 and, at the same time, a good way to skew coverage toward one of the two major-party candidates: Donald Trump.
‘Issues people have’
New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn talked to Semafor (5/5/24) about the “big push” his paper is making to “reestablish our norms and emphasize independent journalism.”
But Kahn is committed to denying that the Times—the most powerful agenda-setting news outlet in the United States—has any say over what issues are considered important:
It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one—immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them?
Should the Times stop covering the economy? No, of course not. But it should stop covering it in a way that overemphasizes inflation over other measures of economic health. In 2023, as increases in wages outpaced inflation in the United States, the paper talked about “inflation” six times as often as it talked about “wage growth” (FAIR.org, 1/5/24).
On immigration, the Times should not be treating calls from local Democratic leaders for greater resources to help settle refugees as “growing pressure” on Biden “to curb record numbers of migrants crossing into the United States” (New York Times, 1/4/24; FAIR.org, 1/9/24).
What Times critics are calling for is not censorship, as Kahn pretends, but a recognition that the paper is not merely holding up a mirror to the world, but making choices about what’s important for readers to know—and that those choices have real-world consequences, including in terms of the issues voters think are important.
Kahn defended his paper as giving “a pretty well-rounded, fair portrait of Biden”—stressing that it had covered what it saw as the positive achievements of his administration in foreign policy, which provides some insight into the core politics of the New York Times:
his real commitment to national security; his deep involvement on the Ukraine war with Russia; the building or rebuilding of NATO; and then the very, very difficult task of managing Israel and the regional stability connected with the Gaza war.
The fact that Kahn thinks that Biden’s handling of Gaza reflects well on the president suggests that Kahn’s father having been on the board of CAMERA (Intercept, 1/28/24)—a group dedicated to pushing news media to be ever more pro-Israel—may not be the irrelevant antisemitic dogwhistle that Kahn dismissed it as.
‘Some coverage of his age’
Surely the New York Times (2/9/24) running at least 26 stories on the subject in a week had something to do with Joe Biden’s age being “at the center of 2024.”
At the same time, Kahn acknowledged that his paper has had “some coverage about [Biden’s] frailty and his age”—but insisted that a regular reader is “not going to see that much” about that.
As it happens, there was a study done of how much the New York Times writes about Biden’s age. The Computational Social Science Lab (3/8/24) at the University of Pennsylvania found that in the week after special counsel Robert Hur cited how old Biden was as part of his decision not to indict him for mishandling classified documents, the Times ran at least 26 stories on the topic of Biden’s elderliness—”of which one of them explored the possibility that Trump’s age was of equal or more concern.” (The study looked only at stories that appeared among the top 20 stories on the Times‘ website home page, a measure of the importance the paper accorded to coverage.)
By way of comparison, CSS Lab noted that when, about the same time, Trump announced “that if he regained power he would pull the US out of NATO and even encourage Russian invasions of democratic allies if their financial commitments were not to his liking,” the Times ran just 10 articles on the issue that made it to the top of its home page.
About two weeks after this burst of coverage, CSS Lab noted a second wave of Times stories about how old Biden was—based on a poll that found that voters were indeed concerned about the subject:
Critically, this second burst was triggered not by some event that generated new evidence about Biden’s age affecting his performance as president, but rather the NYT’s own poll that pointedly asked respondents about the exact issue they had just spent the previous month covering relentlessly…. None of this second wave of articles acknowledges the existence of the first wave or the possibility that poll respondents might simply have been parroting the NYT’s own coverage back to them.
Turning situations into crises
Establishment media have displayed no more urgency about the prospect of Trumpists stealing the 2024 election than they had two years ago (FAIR.org, 2/16/22).
That’s the same pattern that we see with the immigration and inflation stories—and, in the runup to the 2022 midterms, with the “crime wave” issue (FAIR.org, 11/10/22). Corporate media—not the New York Times alone, of course, but the Times does play a leading role—have the ability, through their framing and emphasis, to turn situations into crises. And they have chosen to do this, again and again, in ways that make it more likely that Trump will return to the White House in 2025—with an avowed intent to do permanent damage to democracy.
The prospect does not seem to faze Joe Kahn. “Trump could win this election in a popular vote,” he told Smith. “Given that Trump’s not in office, it will probably be fair.”
It’s a stunningly ignorant comment, given that elections in the United States are not run by the federal government; the Republican Party has been working tirelessly at the state and local level since 2020 to put itself in a position to overturn the popular vote (FAIR.org, 2/16/22). To the extent that the process has federal oversight, it’s largely through a judicial branch in which the GOP-controlled Supreme Court holds supreme power.
But then, why should I expect Kahn to have a deeper understanding of how elections work than he does of how media and public opinion work?
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
Janine Jackson interviewed the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights‘ Ahmad Abuznaid about the Rafah invasionfor the May 10, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Beltway reporters have access to things others can’t see, but can they see things that aren’t there? That question was brought to mind by a May 8 piece by New York Times chief White House reporter Peter Baker, in which he interpreted Biden’s evident decision to “pause” delivery of certain types of bombs to Israel as “meant to convey a powerful signal that his patience has limits.”
Israel’s plans to storm the southern Gaza city of Rafah, Baker explains, “have been a source of intense friction with the Biden administration for months.” That friction was evidently expressed in the unfettered delivery of weapons during those months, and the publicly expressed support for the catastrophic violence that has killed, maimed, orphaned and displaced millions of Palestinians, destroyed their homes and infrastructure, and denied their access to humanitarian aid.
Others, more focused on actions than vibes, saw this step as “overdue but necessary,” if it is part of some serious effort to condition any US support for Israel on ending the bloodshed.
Ahmad Abuznaid: Thank you, Janine. Thanks for having me.
JJ: An invasion of Rafah, we were told, would be an uncrossable “red line” for Biden, but luckily enough, a New York Times headline says, “Attack Not Seen as Full Invasion”—“seen as” being the kind of slippery language media use to suggest something they’d rather not say: that only some people’s definitions matter. What do we know about what’s happening in Rafah right now? Is it surprising, and why would we accept that it doesn’t amount to invasion?
AA: Well, we shouldn’t accept that assessment. Israelis have been saying they’re going to invade Rafah, no matter what. They said they would continue with their “mission,” no matter what. Benjamin Netanyahu just gave a speech and said, despite any pressures or response from outside forces or international forums, Israel will continue.
So I think what’s really the question here is whether President Biden issued his red line in actual red or in pencil. We’re going to find out, because technicalities as to how they view the invasion of Rafah aside, not only has it already occurred, but they’ve clearly made the statement again that they’re going to continue. So I think, really, the ball is in President Biden’s court. Will he continue to be bullied around and told what to do by Netanyahu, or will he act like he’s the president of the US, and call for an end?
JJ: Is the pause, as it’s been called—some people have been saying he stopped giving weapons; that’s not it. It’s been called a pause or a delay in the delivery of certain types of bombs. Is that meaningful? How meaningful is that?
AA: No, that’s not meaningful. And I’ll tell you why. Because in the last few months, there has been shipment after shipment after shipment to Israel. And so to now say that you would pause, or have paused, certain munitions is a little too little, too late. Israel may not, in fact, need what you paused in order to, again, conduct its invasion of Rafah.
So are you going to end the genocide, President Biden? That’s the central question. People aren’t asking for a pause right now. They’re asking for an end to the genocide, and an end to military weaponry to Israel. So it’s clear President Biden is still not reading the room.
JJ: Yeah, yeah. In general, it feels as though the options or the hopes are so tamped down. Ceasefire seems like the ultimate thing that we can call for, but ceasefire doesn’t bring people back to life. It doesn’t put Gazans back in their destroyed homes. I mean, obviously, cease fire, but where would that fit in with what else needs to happen?
AA: Yeah, I mean, the ceasefire is the most immediate demand, and that’s why if President Biden had made this threat via weapons months ago, there literally may have been thousands of lives saved. And so the ceasefire is still the first and most urgent demand, because we’re trying to save lives.
The people of Rafah are not only facing, again, the incredibly brutal and violent genocidal assaults, they’re also facing forced starvation. There was this huge conversation around aid trucks beginning to increase, and now here we are again with aid trucks essentially coming to a halt. So the genocide is real, and that’s the first and most important demand in this moment.
Ahmad Abuznaid: “We need to stop the bloodshed, stop the starvation, stop the siege. But beyond that, we need to make sure this can never happen again.”
But beyond that, after what the US taxpayer, after what the West, after what elected officials have witnessed, how can they continue to go back to the status quo of supporting the state of Israel, even if there’s a ceasefire? I would argue that it’s clear to most Americans at this point that the Israeli government cannot be trusted with our weapons. They’ve taken it so far at this point, with their genocidal conduct, there’s actually no turning back.
And so ceasefire fits in, again, prominently, because we need to stop the bloodshed, stop the starvation, stop the siege. But beyond that, we need to make sure this can never happen again, and to make sure this can never happen again, that means that the state of Israel must not receive any more US arms, period. The US should no longer protect Israel at the International Criminal Court, period. The US should no longer protect the state of Israel at the International Court of Justice, period.
These are all ways that Israel deserves to be isolated in this moment. And, in fact, many countries are already taking that necessary step. We’ve seen Colombia, for instance, cease any relations with the state of Israel, and that’s what’s required of the world right now, especially of the United States, a country that proclaims itself to be one of those leaders of the “free world,” and supportive of people’s self-determination and calls for freedom and justice. If the US is truly that, this is the moment to show it.
And so we’re way beyond the ceasefire. We need a ceasefire immediately, but we need to see some divestment from the Israeli apartheid state, divestment from the genocidal state, and sanctions on the genocidal apartheid state.
JJ: There’s a feeling that the masks are off. Legislators in this country aren’t saying, as they supply Israel with money and bombs and political shielding and international bodies, they aren’t saying, “We hope for peace, but it’s hard. And Israel is our friend.” They’re now saying, “If you don’t full-throatedly support Israel’s ethnic cleansing project, you’re a terrorist supporter, which by the way means you’re a terrorist, and we will see that you are treated accordingly.”
That sentiment has always been there, of course, but it’s still shocking what people are now OK saying out loud–and doing, like HR6408, legislation to define pro-Palestinian groups as terrorist-supporting, and strip their tax exempt status. How are groups like US Campaign for Palestinian Rights responding to these very overt and meaningful legislative threats?
AA: Look, they’ve attempted to stifle BDS and criminalize boycotting of Israel. They’ve attempted to make people pay via loss of state-awarded contracts, and agreements, right? You would sign this pledge. We’ve seen, of course, lawsuits and lawfare utilized, such as the lawsuit that was levied against the US Campaign. And you know what? We fought that and we won.
And so this is actually another overreach, another violation of our constitutional rights, another mode of repression against Palestinian organizing and activism. But the fact of the matter is, this isn’t going to stop us. If they think that a piece of legislation like this is going to cause us to cease our advocacy, our activities, our organizing, our shutting it down for Palestine, then they’ve miscalculated. So what we’ll see is that this will be utilized by the state to attempt to repress and suppress the movement, just like the anti-BDS laws, just like these lawfare expeditions.
But it won’t stop. They won’t silence us, they won’t stop us, and if, at the end of the day, we have to suffer through losing tax-exempt status, I think the organizations that right now are doing anything they can to stop a genocide, I think they’ll gladly sacrifice tax-exempt status. But I hope it doesn’t come to that, because it’s clearly a violation of our First Amendment rights, and our constitutional rights to organize in this country.
JJ: It seems like something has fundamentally changed in terms of the US public, and of course we’re seeing it with college students, but it’s been there before. It feels like flailing on the part of the administration, and on the part of people who want an uncritical support for anything that Israel does, and want support for genocide. The students are just driving them mad. And yet there they are, still doing it. Does this feel like a shift to you? I know you’re not a psychic, but does it seem like something is changing?
AA: Oh, it’s absolutely changing. Millions of people have taken action in the last few months, and that’s been calls, letters, petitions, direct action, civil disobedience, marches, protests, rallies, birddogging, you name it. And now we see encampment, and the students, just like they rose up against the war in Vietnam, just like they rose up for the civil rights movement, just like they rose up against the war in Iraq, the students will continue to be just a huge, huge part of this movement.
And right now, they’re speaking clearly to this country, not only about Palestine, and our need to get a ceasefire and to divest. Their demands are super clear. They’re super prepared. They’re super disciplined and intentional. I’m so proud of them. But not only are they making these demands clear for us in relation to Palestine, they’re also giving us, in plain sight, a contradiction for us to understand and grapple with domestically.
Do we want continued militarization of police, not only in our communities, but on our college campuses? This is what we’re witnessing: riot gear, dispersal techniques used on our students at Ivy League institutions, at non–Ivy League institutions. Literally, the weight of policing being levied against students from the ages of 17 to 20.
And it’s not only a concern that we’re seeing this, obviously, under a supposed Democratic, progressive president; we can see that this is something we should be concerned about, not only now, but in the future here for this country, as we see this intense militarization of our college campuses.
JJ: Let me just say, to me, on some level, the media’s focus on “leverage,” that focus on “Joe is kind of irked at Bibi. Uh oh”—it feels condescending to me, this Great Man theory of history that’s going on. It’s a personal conversation between Joe Biden and Netanyahu. It seems to make a mockery of international law and of human rights, frankly. And I just wonder, what other lenses could media be using? What other things could media be focusing on, that would take it away from “there’s a personal fight between these two guys, and somehow millions of people are affected by it.”
AA: Yeah, I think what media can do is continue to center the horrific nature of this Israeli assault, this genocidal assault on Gaza, the statistics, the data, the stories, the devastation that we’re seeing in Rafah right now. I think centering those voices and that experience, and then thinking about, again, our role, is where the focus needs to be.
The conversations between President Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu are for them to have. What we’re asking for is action. And we’re not going to be satisfied with these leaks of displeasure or of tension or of fracturing friendships. This isn’t about friendships. This is about stopping a genocide. And unfortunately, right now, not only are we not stopping it, we’re arming it and supporting it.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Ahmad Abuznaid. He’s executive director at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Thank you so much, Ahmad Abuznaid, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
The GOP-led House Judiciary Committee (4/17/24) relied on the New York Times for its narrative of how Brazil is “eroding basic democratic values and stifling debate.”
The Republican-led US House Judiciary Committee released a report on April 17 titled “The Attack on Free Speech Abroad and the Biden Administration’s Silence: The Case of Brazil.” The report accused the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court of censorship, based on an interpretation rooted in US law and Twitter company policy.
The GOP report criticizes the court’s investigation and series of rulings that resulted in the deplatforming of 150 Twitter accounts. Many of these accounts belonged to individuals under investigation by Brazil’s Federal Police for their roles in a coup attempt on January 8, 2023, which tried to close Brazil’s National Congress. Its ultimate goal was to shut down the court, arrest three of its judges—including Justice Alexandre de Moraes—and install a military dictatorship.
The report came on the heels of a campaign promoted by Twitter owner Elon Musk. The ultra-billionaire had started to attack Brazil’s highest court days after Michael Shellenberger, a former PR executive who now calls himself an investigative journalist, posted a thread titled “Twitter Files—Brazil.” Shellenberger claimed to show that de Moraes—a conservative appointed by right-wing President Michel Temer—had pressed criminal charges against Twitter (rebranded as X) for refusing to turn over user data on political enemies. Musk viralized the “Twitter Files,” along with a Portuguese-language video in which Shellenberger called de Moraes a totalitarian tyrant.
Days later, Brazil’s former secretary of digital rights, Estela Aranha, unmasked the fraud. Confronting Shellenberger publicly on Twitter, she demonstrated that he had cut and pasted together paragraphs selected from the company’s internal communications on a variety of different issues to create a false narrative (FAIR.org, 4/18/24). The paragraph about criminal charges referred not to de Moraes, but to GAECO, the Sao Paulo district attorney’s office’s organized crime unit, which pressed charges after Twitter refused to turn over user data on a leader of Brazil’s largest cocaine-trafficking organization. Shellenberger apologized in Portuguese, admitting he had no proof that de Moraes had pressed charges against Twitter, then left Brazil.
The eight-page congressional report parroted Musk and Shellenberger’s criticism of the deplatforming of Twitter users, and claimed that ordering the removal of specific posts constitutes “censorship.” Surprisingly, for a report authored by a committee chaired by inner-circle Trump ally Jim Jordan, the most cited journalistic source for the document is the New York Times.
‘Going too far?’
The New York Times (9/26/22) reported that Brazil’s highest court had taken a “repressive turn,” “according to experts in law and government”—with experts who disagreed with that assessment largely ignored in the Times‘ reporting.
A Times article (9/26/22) published five days before Brazil’s 2022 first-round presidential election, headlined “To Defend Democracy, Is Brazil’s Top Court Going Too Far?,” was cited seven times in the Judiciary Committee report. Its central argument is that, “emboldened by new powers the court granted itself in 2019,” Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court—especially de Moraes, who oversaw the Superior Election Court during the 2022 elections—had taken a “repressive turn.”
To fit its narrative, the Times cherry-picked excerpts from the March 14, 2019, decree issued by then–Chief Justice José Dias Toffoli:
The court would investigate “fake news”—Mr. Toffoli used the term in English—that attacked “the honorability” of the court and its justices.
Compare this to the actual paragraph:
Considering the existence of fraudulent news (“fake news”), slanderous accusations, threats and misdeeds cloaked in animus calumniandi [attempt to defame], defamandi [defamation] and injuriandi [injury], which undermine the honor and security of the Federal Supreme Court, its members and their families, it is resolved, in accordance with Article 43 and our internal rules, to start an inquiry to investigate the facts and corresponding offenses in all their dimensions.
Whereas a casual reader of the Times piece, making an association with Donald Trump’s bad-faith use of the term “fake news,” might assume that the decree extends power to the court to repress any speech that offends them personally, the language in the decree, which was upheld as constitutional in a 10-1 vote by the Supreme Federal Court in 2020, clearly links the investigation to four crimes under Brazilian law: fraud, attempt to defame, defamation and injury.
Toffoli’s decree spurred healthy debate among legal scholars, but the powerful Order of Brazilian Lawyers (OAB), which has seven times higher membership than the American Bar Association and manages Brazil’s equivalent of the bar exam, immediately endorsed the investigation. This fact was left out of the Times article, which skewed the debate to suit its narrative by providing one positive, one neutral and five negative quotes from Brazilian “experts” on the investigation.
A different system
US Marshals kill an average of 22 suspects and bystanders a year (Marshall Project, 2/11/21).
Brazil and the United States have very different legal systems. The United States Marshals are the enforcement arm of the US federal court system, with one of its primary functions being to assess, investigate and mitigate threats against judges.
With expanded powers that enable it to arrest fugitives, US Marshals averaged 90,000 arrests a year between 2015 and 2020, killing 124 people in the process. This included innocent bystanders like a teenage girl killed by US Marshal Michael Pezzelle in Phoenix, Arizona, when he opened fire on a vehicle she was sitting in—which, despite coverage in USA Today (2/11/21), was not deemed a worthy enough example of judicial overreach to be covered in the Times.
The US Supreme Court has its own police force, with 189 officers, which operates intelligence and investigation units. Although its power to initiate investigations is more limited than the Brazilian Supreme Court, it recently conducted an investigation on the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Brazil does not have a judiciary police force. According to the 1988 Constitution, the attributes of judiciary police enforcement are granted to the (notoriously corrupt) state civil police; in the case of the Supreme Federal Court, these powers have been delegated to the federal police. It was the failure of this system to adequately respond to the rise of threats against Supreme and Superior Electoral Court ministers that led Chief Justice Toffoli to issue his decree delegating power to de Moraes to start and oversee federal police investigations of such threats.
Threats against judges
At the time Toffoli issued his decree, in 2019, there had been a surge in threats against judges, especially those in the Supreme and Superior Electoral courts, which had initiated an election fraud investigation against the Jair Bolsonaro presidential campaign in October 2018. This increase in threats against the judiciary parallels a similar scenario with the rise of Trumpism in the United States, where the annual number of violent threats against judges rose from 926 in 2015 to 4,511 in 2021.
Former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso said that Eduardo Bolsonaro’s threats against the Supreme Federal Court “smell of fascism” (El País, 10/21/18).
One example of a menacing statement that was widely shared on social media was made by Bolsonaro’s son, congressmember Eduardo Bolsonaro, eight days before the second round of the 2018 presidential elections. Investigative journalist Patricia Campos Mello had published an article in the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper (10/18/18) exposing a group of millionaires—including some, like Luciano Hang, who are portrayed as harmless business executives in the Times article—for spending R$12 million to spread slanderous disinformation against the elder Bolsonaro’s electoral rival, Fernando Haddad, on Meta‘s WhatsApp platform. This campaign included targeting evangelical voters with doctored photos falsely claiming that, as mayor, Haddad had distributed baby bottles with penis-shaped nipples to students in Sao Paulo’s public pre-school system.
Three days later, in a video seen by hundreds of thousands of people, Eduardo Bolsonaro said:
To shut down the Supreme Court, we don’t even have to send a single jeep or soldier. íIf you capture a Supreme Court justice, do you think anyone will protest in their defense?
Across Brazil, hundreds of Bolsonaro supporters upped the ante, including retired army Col. Carlos Alves. In a widely circulated YouTube video (10/22/18), Alves threatened to shut down the Supreme Federal Court, and slandered Superior Electoral Court president Rosa Weber. This triggered requests by the Supreme Court and the commander of the army to open a new investigation against Alves, which was conducted by the Federal Police.
Toffoli’s decree was issued in response to the growing threats and the inability of the justice system to respond efficiently to them. The immediate result of his designation of de Moraes as head of the investigation was that he became the target of a hate campaign by Bolsonaro’s internationally connected support network, which then worked to build a legal argument that, as a victim of their threats, he was unqualified to investigate his aggressors. Meanwhile, the attacks against the Supreme Court and Electoral Court intensified during a four-year build-up that culminated in the 2023 coup attempt.
As the idea of destroying the Supreme Federal Court and installing a dictatorship became the primary rallying cry of the Bolsonarista far right, de Moraes ordered the arrest of congressmember Daniel Silveira, who, as Rio de Janeiro city councilor, once submitted a bill that would have enabled military police to harvest the organs of their shooting victims.
The New York Times article framed his imprisonment and subsequent eight-year, nine-month sentence as the result of a single live stream with a few vague threats. In fact, it was the result of an investigation by the attorney general’s office into Silveira’s four years of systematically inciting the violent abolition of the democratic rule of law. Silviera had abused his authority as an elected official to repeatedly call on the army to shut down the Supreme Federal Court, while disobeying court orders to cease and desist.
A script for a coup
UOL (1/12/23) published a detailed coup recipe found at the house of Bolsonaro’s justice minister.
It may be news to the Republicans who cited the Times in their report on “censorship,” but Brazil’s legal system has all kinds of significant differences from that of the US. It may not be standard practice in Brazil for an investigation judge to rule on the results of his own investigation, but the Times didn’t think it was significant enough to dwell on as a sign of judicial overreach in its 37 articles on Operation Car Wash when Judge Sergio Moro did it during his now-reversed witch hunt against Lula.
Furthermore, Brazil’s speech laws, closer to France or Germany’s than to those in the US, are based on a harmony of rights, meaning that no essential right can be used to infringe on another essential right. This means, for example, that the kind of advocacy for pedophilia promoted by an organization like NAMBLA, viewed as protected free speech by the ACLU, would be illegal in Brazil, due to its infringement on the right to health and happiness for children, as laid out in its Statute of the Child and Adolescent. It means that, like in Germany, advocacy for Nazism is a crime, as it is deemed to infringe on the human rights of the groups that have been historic victims of Nazism.
And it means that in Brazil’s short election seasons, certain types of speech are prohibited if they infringe on the essential right of fair and balanced elections. In practical terms, this means that negative campaign ads and spreading disinformation about other candidates is illegal, and in every election season, the Superior Electoral Court orders candidates to take hundreds of ads off the air for violating these principles, as it did to both Jair Bolsonaro and Lula in the 2022 election season (FAIR.org, 4/18/24).
During the three months following the Times article, two Bolsonaro supporters were arrested trying to detonate a bomb in Brasilia’s airport, and another group of supporters staged a violent attack on Brazil’s Federal Police headquarters. Thousands of Bolsonaro supporters camped out in front of military barracks demanding that they take action and shut down the Federal Supreme Court.
On January 8, following the details of a written plan for a coup d’etat seized in Bolsonaro’s Justice Minister Anderson Torres’ house, a crowd invaded the National Congress and the Supreme Federal Court building with the goal of pressuring Lula to declare a state of siege, which would have turned national security over to the armed forces. Meanwhile, high-tension electrical towers were sabotaged across the country.
News designed for ‘bad actors’
The New York Times (8/20/1939) has been running “Nazi next door” pieces for a long time now.
This also isn’t the first time the GOP has used Times reporting to advance a right-wing agenda. Lawmakers across the country have repeatedly cited Times articles to justify restricting and even criminalizing gender-affirming health care for trans youth (GLAAD, 4/19/23).
When confronted with the Times‘ role in empowering—in GLAAD’s words—”the already powerful to do even more harm,” publisher A.G. Sulzberger (CJR, 5/15/23) dismissed such concerns, scoffing at critics who think “news organizations should not publish information that bad actors might misuse.” “In general,” he responded,
independent reporters and editors should ask, “Is it true? Is it important?” If the answer to both questions is yes, journalists should be profoundly skeptical of any argument that favors censoring or skewing what they’ve learned based on a subjective view about whether it may yield a damaging outcome.
In other words, Sulzberger claims that the Times is just reporting the facts; it’s not their fault if “bad actors” are misusing those facts. It’s the old “objectivity” argument, repackaged in a time when even many within the news industry are acknowledging that objectivity is impossible. But the trouble is, as FAIR showed with the paper’s trans coverage, Times reporting fails Sulzerberger’s own “true” and “important” test (FAIR.org, 5/19/23).
Likewise, in the case of the paper’s Brazil/Twitter coverage, the problem is not that the Times‘ good reporting is being misused by bad actors; it’s the paper’s bad reporting that’s directly feeding yet another right-wing smear campaign.
Looking back at the timing of the article, five days before Brazil’s first-round presidential election, the lack of context and the imbalanced skewing of the Brazilian legal community’s robust debate around Toffoli’s decree in favor of its detractors, it’s no wonder that it’s now being cited by Republican officials.
After a second congressional subcommittee hearing on “censorship” in Brazil, held on May 7, it seems clear Republicans are preparing to use “Biden’s support for censorship in Brazil” as a bullet point for Trump in the upcoming presidential elections. Keep this in mind as the New York Times continues its coverage on “freedom of speech” in Brazil.
Baltimore’s mayoral election tomorrow will be shaped by “the single biggest donation to a political campaign in city history,” but search campaign finance records, and you won’t find it anywhere. What you will find, however, are plenty of other donations from David Smith.
“Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think,” Sinclair chair David Smith told New York (4/2/18). “This is extremely dangerous to a democracy.”
Smith heads up the Sinclair Broadcast Group, and if Sinclair rings a bell, it’s likely from the Orwellian splash the network made six years ago when it required anchors at its local TV stations across the country to read from the same Trump-like anti-media script. This departure from journalistic norms was far from a one-off for Smith or his family’s network, which has quietly become the second-largest in the country, owning or operating 294 TV stations in 89 markets across the country.
“Smith may not be as identifiable as Rupert Murdoch or Jeff Bezos,” noted New York magazine (4/2/18), “but he’s as powerful.” And nowhere has Smith exercised his power more concertedly than his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland.
By “hometown,” I mean where Smith grew up, not where he lives. For many years, both Smith and his company have resided outside the city, in Baltimore County. But Smith still feels a certain kinship for the city where he grew up. Kinship, and a sense of ownership.
In his capacity as Baltimore’s self-appointed overlord, Smith has determined the city needs a new mayor. And he’s taken the liberty of selecting her.
The vetting process wasn’t extensive. Smith settled on his chosen candidate after she agreed to his “checklist” of demands, which included firing the police and schools chiefs, and dismantling a violence-prevention program.
That’s according to a jaw-dropping report by Mark Reutter at Baltimore Brew (1/17/24). Smith’s pick for mayor, Sheila Dixon, denies the Brew’s account. And Smith surely would, too, only he didn’t respond to the Brew—which isn’t surprising, considering Smith’s feelings about print media; they’re “so left wing as to be meaningless dribble,” he told New York.
But it’s undeniable that Smith is backing Dixon, a former mayor, in a big way. A super PAC supporting Dixon’s candidacy, the Better Baltimore PAC, has received $250,000 from Smith, plus another $100,000 from Smith’s nephew, Alex Smith (Baltimore Sun, 5/4/24). (The PAC’s third major donor, developer John Luetkemeyer, has contributed $350,000.)
‘Biggest donation…in city history’
Justine Barron (FAIR.org, 2/16/24): “Over the last 20 years, Smith and his family have become increasingly powerful in Baltimore’s political, corporate and media landscape, and they have used their local media holdings to promote their agendas.”
And Smith’s efforts on behalf of Dixon may not end there. As FAIR (2/16/24) reported, Dixon’s candidacy has been aided by her consistent presence on Fox 45, Sinclair’s flagship Baltimore station.
Controlling one of Baltimore’s major television stations, while simultaneously wielding hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, adds up to serious political clout. But apparently it’s not enough for Smith.
In January, Smith personally purchased the Baltimore Sun, Maryland’s largest newspaper, for an undisclosed sum (FAIR.org, 2/16/24). (Smith claims he paid “nine figures,” meaning $100 million or more.) Smith bought the Sun from hedge fund Alden Capital, which had taken ownership of the paper in 2021, when it bought the Sun’s parent company, Tribune Publishing. (Alden, a hedge fund known for sucking newspapers dry, is now the second-largest newspaper chain in the country, a fact that depresses me to no end.)
Any hope that Smith would leave his right-wing politics at the Sun’s door was dashed in his first meeting with the paper’s staff. Smith encouraged Sun reporters to focus on the failures of Baltimore’s public schools, so its students don’t turn into “those people, that class of people” who are “always going to be on welfare” (Baltimore Banner, 1/18/24).
At the same meeting, Smith openly bragged about using Fox 45 to pressure elected officials. Naturally, he used a Baltimore Democrat as his example:
If I do a poll that asks a very simple question: Should [Maryland state senate president] Bill Ferguson be thrown under the bus? You know what the answer is? Unequivocally, yes…. You know what Bill Ferguson’s view of that poll is? It scares him to death. And you know what it says to him? Maybe I better rethink what my political posture is.
By adding the Sun to his Baltimore media holdings, Smith is that much closer to becoming the city’s kingmaker. “David has always thought of the Sun as an obstacle to Fox 45, so why not buy it and turn it into Fox 45,” a person with knowledge of Smith’s thinking told the Brew (1/17/24). “Who buys a major newspaper four months before a mayoral primary?” this person asked. He added that Smith’s purchase is “the single biggest donation to a political campaign in city history.”
‘Unprecedented territory’
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott campaign said that Fox 45 had “showcased themselves to be entirely incapable of being impartial and ethical in their approach” (Baltimore Banner, 3/14/24).
The only thing standing in Smith’s way is the incumbent mayor, 40-year-old Brandon Scott, who narrowly defeated Sheila Dixon four years ago (in the Democratic primary, the election that matters in deep-blue Baltimore).
In their May 14 rematch, Scott won’t have the Sun’s endorsement, like he did four years ago (5/22/20). In fact, Smith’s media properties have been so biased against Scott that the mayor refused to participate in an April debate jointly hosted by the Sun and Fox 45. “We are truly in unprecedented territory,” Scott’s campaign manager said, “when the owner of the news outlet hosting a debate is also the leading political donor to one of the candidates participating in the same debate.”
The moderator for the debate only heightened Scott’s concerns: It was to be Armstrong Williams, and the event was to be branded “The Armstrong Williams Town Hall.”
A little history is in order. Williams first shot to fame when he was found to be in the pocket of the George W. Bush administration. In exchange for $240,000, Williams quietly agreed to provide Bush’s policies with positive coverage. Whenever I see Williams’ name, these details rush back to me. But there’s another aspect of the scandal that I’d forgotten, and it involves Smith.
To satisfy the terms of the secret deal, Williams had to reach a national television audience. “Fortunately for Williams,” noted Rolling Stone (2/24/05), “he was good friends with David Smith.” And Sinclair agreed to air Williams’ segments. (A Sinclair producer described one of them as “the worst piece of TV I’ve ever been associated with…. Clearly propaganda.”)
For his part, Smith claimed he didn’t know about Williams’ secret deal; but he was also untroubled by it, calling the controversy surrounding it “foolish.”
‘Only rank partisans’
“The residents of Baltimore deserve better than Scott’s revisionist crime data,” Armstrong Williams (Baltimore Sun, 4/29/24)—referring to Baltimore’s 20% drop in homicides in 2023.
In the subsequent two decades, Smith and Williams have remained personally and financially close. While maintaining a continued presence on Sinclair’s airwaves, Williams has purchased several divested Sinclair stations at suspiciously low prices; and also been made co-owner of the Sun.
But it wasn’t just Armstrong Williams’ shady past that made him an imperfect debate moderator; like Smith, he also appears to favor Dixon. In the buildup to her announcement, Dixon spoke with Williams on Fox 45 for a full hour (6/22/23).
“With his totally softball and praising interview, the host fulfilled what I assume was his assignment: promote Dixon as an alternative to the incumbent mayor,” Sun columnist Dan Rodricks (6/27/23) wrote, six months before Smith purchased the Sun.
Three months after Smith’s purchase, Williams penned his own Sun column (4/29/24) on the mayoral race, which noted Baltimore’s declining homicides and shootings, and asked, “But who deserves the credit?” One might think that the city’s top official deserves some of the credit—but Williams informed readers that “only rank partisans credit Mayor Scott.”
Anyway, Baltimore—a city with more than its fair share of challenges—finished 2023 with homicides under 300 for the first time in almost a decade. Meanwhile, Scott “also can tout a growing economy and robust employment rate,” according to the Baltimore Banner (12/7/23).
So, despite David Smith’s media empire aiming square at him, Mayor Scott has a fighting chance at winning reelection tomorrow, with polls showing him slightly ahead of Dixon.
Of course, when it comes to Baltimore, there’s a certain non-resident who feels entitled to having the last word. And I’d like to give it him—or, more specifically, to his well-coiffed, on-air captives, who in 2018 were required to read the following:
We’re concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country…. Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think. This is extremely dangerous to a democracy.
Republicans made it clear that they wanted to defund NPR because they didn’t like the viewpoints they thought it aired—calling it “a progressive propaganda purveyor” (WBMA, 5/8/24).
Every so often, Republicans in Washington engage in the ritual of shouting about public broadcasting’s supposed left-wing bias, usually threatening to cut its federal funding.
It’s been happening nearly from the moment the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was established in 1967 to provide federal funding for public radio and television. Nixon went after the CPB in 1969, leading to Fred Rogers’ famous congressional testimony that helped protect it. Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump all launched attacks on public broadcasting. GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich attempted to eliminate the CPB in the mid-’90s, and congressional Republicans sought to do it again in 2005 and 2011. (See Politico, 10/23/10; FAIR.org, 2/18/11; HuffPost3/16/17.)
It’s hardly surprising, then, to find public radio in the GOP’s crosshairs again this year (WBMA, 5/8/24), since congressional Republicans have been spending most of their time launching McCarthyist hearings into the Biden administration and elite institutions they accuse of “liberal” or “woke” bias (FAIR.org, 4/19/24).
This time, the attack was spurred by former NPR business editor Uri Berliner’s lengthy Substack essay (Free Press, 4/9/24; FAIR.org, 4/24/24) arguing that the outlet’s “progressive worldview” had compromised its journalism. The right gleefully pounced, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee called a hearing to investigate, among other things, “How can Congress develop solutions to address criticism that NPR suffers from intractable bias?”
A voice for the heard
By the time of FAIR’s 2015 study (7/15/15), NPR had almost completely barred political commentary from its major shows, in a futile hope of not angering censorious lawmakers.
As FAIR has documented throughout the years, the primary “intractable bias” public broadcasting suffers from is a bias toward the same corporate and political elites that dominate the rest of establishment media—despite the fact that it was created to “provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard.”
We conducted our first study of the sources on NPR‘s main news programming in 1993 (Extra!, 4–5/93), when Democrats controlled the White House and Congress. Republican guests nonetheless outnumbered Democrats 57% to 42%. Public interest voices made up 7% of sources; women were 21% of all sources.
When we revisited the guest lists in 2004 (5/04), partisan control in Washington had flipped, but little changed at NPR. Republican guests outnumbered Democrats by slightly more (61% to 38%). Public interest voices were slightly lower, and only a few percentage points more than on commercial networks (6% compared to 3% of sources). Women were still 21% of all sources.
When FAIR (7/15/15) looked at NPR‘s commentators in 2015, we found that 71% of its regular commentators (i.e., who gave two or more commentaries in the five-month study period) were white men. Eight percent were men of color, and 21% were white women; no women of color were regular commentators during the period studied.
Led by private elites
The overwhelming domination of public radio’s boards of directors by the corporate elite (FAIR.org, 7/2/15) is a consequence of the strategy of relying on the wealthy for financial support.
FAIR has also looked at the governing boards of the eight most-listened-to NPR affiliate stations (7/2/15). Of the 259 board members, 75% had corporate backgrounds (e.g., executives in banks, investment firms, consulting companies and law firms). They also lacked ethnic diversity and gender parity, with 72% non-Latine white members and 66% men. In other words, legal control over public radio in this country is firmly in the hands of the privileged few.
NPR‘s national board of directors is a mix of member station managers and so-called “public members.” At the time of our study, there were ten station managers and five public members, who in fact represented the corporate elite. Shortly after FAIR’s study, NPR expanded its board to include nine public members; members today include bigwigs from Apple, Yahoo, Hulu, Starbucks, consulting firm BCG and investment bank Allen & Company.
And the percentage of NPR‘s revenues that comes from corporate sponsors continues to increase over time. In 2009, that number stood at 24%; today it is 38%.
Meanwhile, NPRreceives less than 1% of its funding from the federal government. But nearly a third of its revenue does come from member stations’ programming and service fees—and the CPB accounts for approximately 8% of those stations’ revenues. (Other federal, state and local government funding contributes another 6%.) That’s why NPRcalls continued federal funding “critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR.”
Dampening critical coverage
NPR adopted a definition of “lying” that required telepathy (FAIR.org, 3/1/17).
There is no current threat to public broadcasting funding, with Democrats in control of the Senate and White House. Even when Republicans have controlled Washington, they’ve always backed down in the end. While that’s not inevitable, defunding isn’t necessarily the ultimate goal: The mere threat of defunding is generally sufficient to reinvigorate public media’s efforts to prove their non-liberal bona fides, pushing them to the right.
In one remarkable example, shortly after the 2011 attack on NPR, the outlet stopped distributing an opera program when its host participated in an Occupy protest.
This week’s hearing comes after months of GOP House committee hearings on campus antisemitism, in which leaders of universities (and even city K–12 schools) have been repeatedly hauled before Congress to explain why they aren’t clamping down harder on freedom of speech and assembly. Disturbingly, the committee investigating NPR has demanded that NPR CEO Katherine Maher document and report the partisan affiliations of all news media staff of the past five years, as well as all board members.
As always, these attacks are very useful in dampening critical public media coverage of even extreme right-wing rhetoric and actions. During Trump’s presidency, for instance, NPR refused to call Trump’s lies “lies” (FAIR.org, 1/26/17, 3/1/17) and uncritically used far-right think tanks to defend him (FAIR.org, 2/7/17).
It’s because of public broadcasting’s serious vulnerability to both political and corporate pressure that FAIR has long argued (e.g., Extra!, 9–10/05; FAIR.org, 2/18/11) that we need truly independent public media—public media that don’t take corporate money, or have corporate leadership, and that don’t have to appease political partisans.
In the meantime, it’s critical that NPR stand up to the GOP’s McCarthyism and refuse to accept federal funds when they come with political strings attached.
Featured image: NPR‘s DC headquarters (Creative Commons photo: Todd Huffman).
Janine Jackson interviewed Media 2070’s Joseph Torres and Collette Watson about media reparations for the May 3, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: The idea of some form of public, communal recognition and redress, or reparation, for Black Americans for centuries of systemic, state-sanctioned harms, and their lasting and continuing impact, is not new. But our guests’ work considers the particular meaningful and sustained harms of news media, of journalistic institutions charged with informing the public without fear or favor, that historically and currently have used their special place and power to help drive the oppression of Black and brown people—through storytelling, and through overt support for racist practices, policies and ideas.
Media 2070 was co-founded by Joseph Torres, who is senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press—and co-author, with Juan Gonzalez, of the crucial book News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media—and writer, musician and communication strategist Collette Watson, who is co-founder of the new group Black River Life. Their co-authored article, “Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm,” appears in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
And they both join us now by phone from Washington, DC, and Phoenix, Arizona, respectively. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Joe Torres and Collette Watson.
All right, well, “crisis of journalism” is going to be a phrase that a lot of listeners are familiar with. It’s a conversation among people, and among philanthropists, about how we can “save journalism.” But it’s unclear to us at FAIR, as to many others, if some of those folks in that conversation really understand that corporate journalism, US mainstream, so-called, journalism, has always contained its own poison. And if they are actually willing to address that, or if the goal is more of the same elite conversations that have excluded lots of people, but to do them in a more genteel way than maybe Fox News.
So I want to ask you both, to start: What is missing from current diagnoses and remedies for what we’re told is the crisis of journalism?
Collette Watson: I guess I’ll kick us off, and just say that what’s missing is an acknowledgement of our media system’s history of harm. And when we talk about that—Joe and I are both co-creators of the Media 2070 project—when Media 2070 talks about this, we often say that, similar to our education system and our legal system, which so many people understand as oppressive, our media system is rooted in anti-Blackness, and in racism and racial hierarchy, since the very beginning.
When you look at the earliest colonial newspapers, which stayed afloat on the revenues that they were gaining from serving as brokers in the trafficking of enslaved African people, by not only posting ads, paid ads, for people who had emancipated themselves and run away, but also in the sales of enslaved folks and serving as a broker for those transactions.
We know that from that earliest route, right on through till now, our system of news, information, journalism—even entertainment media, book publishing—all of those are interconnected, and have been rooted in upholding a myth of Black inferiority, and have actually perpetuated white supremacy and even white nationalism. So you have to have that in mind, whenever you are thinking about journalism and the role it has played in society, and the role that we want it to play in the safe, just, multiracial democracy we want in the future. We can’t achieve that without acknowledging the history of harm.
Joseph Torres: I’ll add, Collette and I, we began writing this essay over a year ago for this political journal, and Collette, one of the co-creators of 2070, but also the senior director of the 2070 project until recent weeks, and what we try to do in this essay is: There is this big debate happening right now about the future of journalism, and how it goes, is mostly a white-led space. And the way the discussion has taken place is, the democracy is in crisis and so is journalism, and we need to save local journalism to save democracy. But as Collette is describing, what that does not acknowledge is the role of local news organizations and in local journalism in undermining democracy for Black people and people of color.
At the Media 2070 project, we’re asking the question: when hasn’t journalism been in crisis for Black people, and when hasn’t democracy? And these media institutions have played a direct role in undermining democracy.
These are all just within recent years, and within the future of journalism debate, there isn’t even acknowledgement that this actually happened, that these papers have actually apologized.
What are we creating that’s different? How do we address issues of racial hierarchies, and that these institutions have played a role in undermining democracy for Black folks, and for other folks of color? So if we think the current democracy can be equated with the right to vote and equal-protection rights being reinstated 60 years ago, local journalism by dominant news organizations have played a role in undermining democracy, so-called democracy, for Black folks and other folks of color since the get-go, and still are today.
And so we are just trying to make an intervention into this debate, because the debate is happening; there’s a lot of money being invested in the space. There’s a lot of policy work happening—not just with the federal government, in local states—trying to make an intervention in funding local journalism. And we are afraid we’re just going to be replicating the same kind of harms.
JJ: Yeah, saving democracy via local journalism seems to mean, for a lot of folks, just shore up and sustain these local journalistic outlets. There’s the missing piece of acknowledgement of the harms that those outlets have done, and it’s clear that some people view the whole idea of reparations more broadly as “something bad happened to people in the past,” and so people that “look like them,” to put it crudely, are looking for resources now.
But I feel that, particularly if you look internationally, and even within this country, that understanding is shifting, so that people see, not just that harms on individuals, but on communities, are unending, but also that they see that truth and reconciliation processes, that they’ve seen in South Africa or in Argentina or in El Salvador, for example, they involve healing for the whole community.
And the starting place is not only about debts unpaid, but it’s about acknowledging that there’s been a distorted understanding of history, that everyone has been harmed –, particularly the people who have been specifically oppressed and harmed, but reparation involves acknowledgement first. It’s not a question of throwing money at the issue. There is an acknowledgement, and a truth-telling, that has to happen first.
That’s my rambling, you can call that a question, but you know what I’m saying, that it’s not enough to say, “Oh, we did a bad thing,” as some papers are doing. “Back in the 18-dickity-do, we wrote a bad thing, but we’re sorry about it.” That’s not what is being called for.
CW: Absolutely. And I think one key part of this is really seeking to broaden, not only our sense of journalism and its history and its future, but our sense of what repair and reparations involve.
When we created the Media Reparations Project, we also sought to really spread the understanding that reparations has to be a holistic process. We took a lot of inspiration and leadership from people who have been fighting for reparations ever since emancipation. And when we are speaking to what reparations is all about, often in community, people sort of reduce it to this idea of a check.
As you just said, Janine, it’s not just this one-time apology, or even a one-time payment. It has to be holistic and understood as a process, a journey rather than a destination. And speaking of folks we took inspiration from, our friends at Liberation Ventures, which is a reparations organization, they describe reparations as a comprehensive process that involves reckoning, acknowledgement, accountability and redress.
And when you’re talking about the realm of journalism, Joe mentioned a couple of different platforms and papers that have issued apologies and sort of stopped there. And we know that this entire conversation around the future of journalism is one that should really inform what next. After the apology, and after the investigation, what is it that newspapers and other media platforms can and should be doing to rectify the different types of harm that they have wrought—whether that be sensationalistic headlines and false headlines that led to racial terrorism and lynching, whether that be the ways that, even to this very day, it’s nearly impossible for journalists to sustain careers because of toxicity in newsrooms. And there’s so much more that we could name, but it has to be an ongoing process that’s engaged with people who have been directly impacted, and defined by community.
Joe Torres: “For us to be able to tell our own stories, to own our own institutions, in order to fight for racial justice, for reparations, the system is going to have to change too.”
JT: When we’re talking about these papers, we talk about narratives, right? And narratives are a political tool. Narratives are used by those in power, and these media companies, to uphold racial hierarchy. And “uphold racial hierarchy” means not just within those newsrooms, but within the society as well. So these newsrooms are playing an outsized role in shaping what local communities look like. And we talked about the example of segregation in Baltimore, and wealth creation and wealth death and all that.
And so these media companies are playing a role in reinforcing the racial hierarchies throughout each community they serve, whether schooling, housing, just name it, right? They’re playing a role in shaping the society with their narratives. Because these powerful media owners are political players within the society in which they exist.
And so the idea of acknowledgement, it’s just the beginning, as Colette is saying, and you’re talking about, too, Janine; it has to be like, how do we get to redress?
Because what’s happening, they reinforce structural racism in our society in all these various ways.. And for us, we’re just focused on the media part, because structural racism also exists in the media system. So for us to be able to tell our own stories, to own our own institutions, in order to fight for racial justice, for reparations, the system is going to have to change too, for our own communities to be able to own and control the creation and the distribution of their own narratives.
And so this is what we’re fighting for. If we can shift how media functions, I think there’s a better chance, or a greater chance, that we could actually address all the other underlying causes that are affecting society, that newsrooms play a role in promulgating in all these different ways.
Colette Watson: “There’s a deep distrust of journalism across communities of color, because there is a deep history of harm.”
CW: Joe, I think in addition to changing the way that the media has perpetuated hierarchy and harm in society, this discussion around repair, and really reframing the way we understand the future of journalism conversation, is also an invitation to actually save journalism. And I think that there’s a lack of understanding of the fact that journalism being white-dominated, and being steeped in a worldview of Black inferiority and a worldview of racial hierarchy, has very much been a part of why we find this industry to be faltering at this point.
It’s policies and culture and so much, but it’s all grounded and rooted in journalism’s early rootedness in racism. And what I mean when I say that is, we talk a lot and we hear a lot about community trust and community engagement and different things about how audiences perceive the field, and how they’re willing to even maybe invest in it, whether that be investing time or what have you. But there’s a deep distrust of journalism across communities of color, because there is a deep history of harm.
And then there are so many journalists of color who have tried to be truth tellers, and tried to embody the true purpose of journalism in holding power to account, who have found it next to impossible to do that, because of toxicity inside dominant and corporate newsrooms, and because of the underfunding and underinvestment in Black-serving and other-serving, different religious minorities and other groups, LGBTQIA+ community—all of the newsrooms that serve these marginalized identities have been woefully under-resourced by the public sector and by philanthropy, when compared to their white counterparts.
And so, whether it be on the part of journalists of color or communities of color, there’s this deep divide, and this sense that the main, dominant media doesn’t care about our lives, and doesn’t think of us when they’re talking about journalism and democracy. And when I talk about that to people, I like to always say, there’s two words you can add on, in the ways you’re talking about these issues of the future of journalism, that’ll take you so much further than where we usually go. And those two simple words are “for who.” Journalism for who? Democracy for who? Who are we serving?
Carla Murphy talks about “multiple mainstreams,” and thinking of the future of our media system as one that is steeped in serving the information needs of just so many different kinds of folks, and serving the creation of conditions for different kinds of justice. And I think that when you begin to think about who we are wanting to serve and whose needs we’re centering, that opens up so much more opportunity and so much more oxygen around what journalism can be. But we can’t get there if we just talk about it the same old way and really are using legislation and policy ideas and philanthropy to shore up the status quo.
JJ: Absolutely. I just want to say that, for some folks, this might sound out of pocket; it might sound like a new idea. But the truth is, this is drawing on roots. The Kerner Commission, just to say one thing folks remember, but they remember it as saying, media should do better by Black people. And that’s not what it said. It said news media are failing everybody and failing the future with their white-centric perspective. It challenged the whole thing. So there are historical roots that you’re pulling on here. There are traditions here, there are examples here. It’s not out of whole cloth. There is something to connect to here that gives strength to the ideas that we’re putting forward here.
CW: Yes. I mean, Joe Torres, for my money, is one of the most incredible researchers and minds that we have in this field, and I really encourage folks to dig into the essay, because throughout these pages, as you’re describing, Janine, there are just so many examples from throughout history.
A lot of people don’t realize, for instance, that the earliest FCC broadcasting licenses were issued during the Jim Crow era, and so to white men only. And so that leads us to the present day, where we have a media system where just a very scant percentage of our TV and radio are Black-owned.
And we could go on and on, because, like I said, Joe has just done exhaustive effort here in making sure that we have the evidence when we talk about this. Joe, I know you don’t like getting credit, but….
JJ: But, hey, when you have to, you have to, because voids need to be filled, frankly. It’s not a conversation that folks have. Folks have it rhetorically: “I bet there’s things missing here,” but they don’t know what’s missing, and that’s—they need work like you’re doing.
JT: I appreciate that. Collette knows I don’t like that, but I appreciate it. One of the things we learned in putting this essay together four years ago, was that in Chicago, there was a commission formed to study the causes of the upheaval, the Chicago race riots. And it came out in a report in 1922, and it devoted a significant portion of the report to the media’s role, the white media’s role, in fomenting this. And so here was an example of a multiracial commission that said, “Hey, the media, especially the white media, played a role in this racial, so-called, unrest, the violence that happened in this city.”
Then you talk about the Kerner Commission, Janine, and then 50 years later after that, what we have in 2020, the uprisings, and all these folks within journalism circles calling on their newspapers or their media institutions to address racism in their own newsrooms.
And one of the things that’s really understudied, it’s a really unbelievable example to me: In 1964, the Community Relations Service was created. It became, soon after that, an agency within the Department of Justice. And the peacekeepers, the mediators, they realized early on, within the first few years of its founding, that a major obstacle to integrating our society, to people adhering to Brown v. Board, was journalism, was the media, and that they had to try to not just integrate the media systems, but they started to hold conferences for Black and brown folks, and for people to fight license challenges against broadcast, and they brought in experts who came in and taught activists how to challenge broadcast licenses. This is within the Department of Justice, and that part of its mission was basically not funded anymore, following the Nixon administration, right?
Here’s a government agency within the Department of Justice, realizing that the biggest obstacle to people adhering to the decision of Brown v. Board, and integrating our society, was the media. That’s another indictment, as you’re saying, about the Kerner Commission, a little over 50-plus years ago.
And so we’re still dealing with this. We’re still dealing with that we don’t have our own institutions, that the first chairman of the FCC was the former chief justice for the Mississippi Supreme Court. Of course Black and brown people wouldn’t get licenses during this era. It’s all been baked in, right? It’s all been baked in. And since then, consolidation has only put things out of reach for us, compounding the lack of wealth that exists in our community because of the extraction of our nation’s political project, right?
JJ: Absolutely. Well, I’ll just ask, finally, what do folks who think, media reparations? Is that going to restrict what I get to see and hear? Is that going to police what I get to see and hear? That’s not the conversation that we’re talking about having, right?
CW: Absolutely. I mean, Joe, I will defer to you.
JT: Well, I mean, we talk about abundance. It should be an abundance of voices out there. And there’s no reason we have such a concentrated media system, where you have a few companies; and here we talk about the cable/broadcast model, for example, which—television is still making a lot of money, and news is driving that. So while we’re talking about a so-called crisis in journalism, we talk about, normally, print media. Broadcast media is trying to get in the action too, and trying to take legislative efforts to get their piece of the pie, while they’re making a lot of money, right?
And so, it’s like, how can we have an abundance of Black and BIPOC media outlets out there that’s serving local communities, that’s providing a variety of perspectives. And we are fighting for not only the variety of perspectives, but also a tether to serve the health and well-being of the community, not out there for bottom-line profits, right, and to maximize profit. How can we have an abundance of this?
The idea is, it’s not what’s being taken away from you, it’s what’s going to be added to your life, to ensure the health and well-being of the communities. How is it serving the health and well-being of the needs of people in local communities and local society? And media can play an instrumental role in ensuring that, in advocating for that. Or it too often plays a detrimental role, as we see, in taking away those kinds of rights that allow people to have their basic needs served, in housing and food and schooling.
And so, the vision for an abundance of media outlets that are well-funded? There’s no reason why we can’t do that. We invest so little in this country into media, and especially in public media, and we can create something different, and something better.
JJ: That’s beautiful. All right, we’ve been speaking with Joe Torres from Free Press and Collette Watson at Black River Life. You can tap into the work that we’ve been talking about at MediaReparations.org. Joseph and Colette, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
This week on CounterSpin: CNN’s Jake Tapper is mad about college students protesting their institutions’ and their government’s support for Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza—because they’re preventing him, by his account, from covering Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. Tapper whined recently: “We’re covering these protests and covering free speech versus security on campus. This is taking room from my show that I would normally be spending covering what is going on in Gaza, or what is going on with the International Criminal Court.”
Tapper and CNN, we’re to understand, are powerless to decide what they cover, and incapable of understanding that the clear, core demand of students protesting is that government (and media) not just chat about, but act to change, US enabling of Israel’s genocidal assault.
(photo: Jim Naureckas)
“I don’t know that the protesters are, from a media perspective, accomplishing what they want to accomplish,” Tapper said. If you listen closely, you can hear him say, “We, as media, don’t want them to accomplish anything, except to be presented, as protestors have throughout US history, as a nuisance and an interference with grownup conversation. And we, as media, will use our actual power to sell that idea.”
People, in media and elsewhere, who are used to unequivocal US support for Israel’s actions, used to summarily reducing any criticism of Israel to antisemitism, even when it comes from Jewish people, are seeing the ground shift, and they’re shook. What happens now is critical—first for Palestinians and Israelis, of course, but also for the US press and their handlers, who are so used to driving the narrative they don’t know what to do except yell “shut up shut up shut up” and send in the cops. In the name of, you know, principled debate.
During the summer of protests that followed the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd in May 2020, journalists and readers alike began taking a hard look at how much news reporting relied on police sources. In particular, the standard use of “police said” articles—where the main or only source of information came from law enforcement—was leading the media to publish information that was outright wrong.
Journalists learned some lessons from the Black Lives Matter protests (Washington Post, 6/30/20)—and promptly forgot them.
In their first media statement on Floyd’s death, Minneapolis police claimed that officers had observed Floyd “suffering medical distress and called for an ambulance”; it was only when cellphone video emerged that it was reported that police were in fact kneeling on Floyd’s neck at the time (NBC News, 5/26/20). To many, it was all too familiar a pattern: Five years earlier, the Baltimore Sun (4/24/15) had based its reporting on the police killing of Freddie Gray almost entirely on official police statements, downplaying eyewitness reports that officers had thrown Gray headfirst into a van shortly before he died of neck injuries.
“What the police tell you initially is a rumor,” Mel Reeves, an editor at the then-86-year-old African-American newspaper the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder told the Washington Post (6/30/20). “And a lot of the times it’s not accurate.” CNN (6/6/20), in a report on how camera footage often ended up disproving police claims, went further: “Videos from several recent incidents, and countless others from over the years, have shown what many Black Americans have long maintained: that police officers lie.”
Yet four years later, when protests broke out on college campuses calling for universities to divest from companies that support the Israeli government’s campaign of killing civilians in Gaza, US media forgot those lessons—and ended up repeatedly misinforming readers as a result.
‘Trying to radicalize our children’
Nahla Al-Arian could more accurately described as a retired elementary teacher visiting the campus that her journalist daughter graduated from.
The morning after the New York Police Department arrested 282 people at Columbia University and the City College of New York during protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, MSNBC’s Morning Joe (5/1/24) welcomed New York City Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD deputy commissioner of public information Tarik Sheppard as its sole guests. “At what point was it known to you that this was something more [than students] and that there were people who maybe had plans for worse than what some of the students were up to?” MSNBC anchor Willie Geist asked Adams. The mayor replied:
We were able to actually confirm that with our intelligence division and one of the individual’s husband was arrested for and convicted for terrorism on a federal level…. These were professionals that were here. I just want to send a clear message out that there are people who are harmful and are trying to radicalize our children.
Co-anchor Mika Brzezinski nodded in approval. When Adams added, “I don’t know if they’re international, we need to look into that as well,” Brzezinski softly said, “Yes.”
The story of the terrorist’s wife had first been put forward by city officials the previous evening, when CBS New York reporter Ali Bauman posted on Twitter, now rebranded as X (4/30/24; since deleted, but widely screenshotted), that “City Hall sources tell @CBSNewYork evidence that the wife of a known terrorist is with protestors on Columbia University campus.” At 1:47 am, CNN (5/1/24) issued a “breaking news” alert identifying the couple, Nahla and Sami Al-Arian, and showing a photo of Nahla on campus that Sami had posted to Twitter.
The next morning, Jake Offenhartz of the Associated Press (5/1/24) tracked down this “professional” agitator: Nahla Al-Arian was a retired elementary school teacher, and Sami a former computer engineering professor at the University of South Florida. He had been arrested in 2003 at the behest of then–US Attorney General John Ashcroft and charged with supporting the group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. After spending two years in jail awaiting trial, he was acquitted on all but one charge (a jury was deadlocked on the remaining count), and eventually agreed to a plea deal in which he and his wife moved to Turkey.
Nahla Al-Arian had visited the protests a week earlier with her daughters, both TV journalists, one a Columbia Journalism School graduate. Nahla stayed for about an hour, she told the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill (5/3/24), listening to part of a teach-in and sharing some hummus with students, then returned to Virginia, where she was visiting her grandchildren, when Columbia students occupied a university building and police moved in to make arrests.
‘Look at the tents’
“Look at the tents,” NYPD official Kaz Daughtry told Fox 5 (4/23/24). “They all were the same color, the same ones that we saw at NYU, the same ones that we see at Columbia.”
This wasn’t the first time the NYPD had alleged that outsiders were behind the campus protests. A week earlier, after the Columbia encampment had resulted in an earlier round of arrests at the behest of university president Minouche Shafik, Fox 5 Good Day New York (4/23/24) brought on Sheppard and NYPD Commissioner of Operations Kaz Daughtry as its guests. “The mayor is describing some of the people there as professional agitators,” said anchor Rosanna Scotto. “Are these just students?”
“Look at the tents,” replied Daughtry. “They all were the same color, the same ones that we saw at NYU, the same ones that we see at Columbia. To me, I think someone is funding this.”
After an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (4/24/24) asserted that “Rockefeller and Soros grants are subsidizing those who disrupt college campuses”— actually, one protestor at Yale and one at the University of California, Berkeley, were former fellows at a nonprofit funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund—the New York Post (4/26/24) wrote that “copycat tent cities have been set up at colleges including Harvard, Yale, Berkeley in California, the Ohio State University and Emory in Georgia—all of them organized by branches of the Soros-funded Students for Justice in Palestine.”
At the same time, as Wired (4/25/24) reported, dozens of Facebook and Twitter accounts had posted identical messages about the tents, saying: “Almost all the tents are identical—same design, same size, same fresh-out-of-the-box appearance. I know that college students are not that rich or coordinated.”
Snopes (4/29/24) later investigated the Post’s claims, and found no evidence that Soros had funded Students for Justice in Palestine. Meanwhile, Hell Gate (4/24/24) had checked Daughtry’s theory of a secret tent-funder through advanced data gathering: They googled it. As it turned out, there was a simpler explanation for why students across the city were using similar tents—they were the cheapest ones available online, for as little as $15. “My God,” reported the news site, “looks like what we’ve got on our hands is a classic case of college students buying something cheap and disposable.”
‘This is what professionals bring’
NYPD’s Tarik Sheppard presented as evidence of “outside agitators” a bike lock with the same Kryptonite logo as the locks sold by Columbia (photo: Christopher Robbins/Hell Gate).
The same Morning Joe appearance by Adams and Sheppard introduced another household item that, police claimed, was a clear sign of outsiders being behind the protests. “You brought in a pretty staggering visual,” Brzezinski said to Sheppard. After he spoke about how “outside agitators” wanted to “create discord,” she prodded him, “Tell us about this chain.”
Sheppard lifted up a heavy metal chain, which clattered noisily against his desk. “This is not what students bring to school,” he declared. (“Don’t think so!” replied Brzezinski.) “This is what professionals bring to campuses and universities…. And this is what we encountered on every door inside of Hamilton Hall.”
That night, Fox News (5/1/24) ran the clip of Sheppard brandishing the chain, with anchor Sean Hannity calling the situation “a recipe for disaster.” The New York Daily News (5/1/24) quoted Sheppard’s “not what students bring to school” statement as well, without any attempt to check its accuracy.
Almost immediately, the “professional” chain story began to unravel. Less than 20 minutes after the Morning Joe segment, New York Times visual investigations reporter Aric Toler (5/1/24) tweeted that the exact same chain was not only used by Columbia students, it was in fact sold by the university’s own public safety department, under its “Crime Prevention Discount Bike, Locker and Laptop Lock Program.” At an NYPD press conference later that morning, The City reporter Katie Honan then showed the school’s listing to Sheppard, who insisted, “This is not the chain.”
Toler later tweeted a photo comparing the two, which appeared almost identical. Hell Gate editor Christopher Robbins, who was at the press conference, provided FAIR with a still frame from a video showing that the chain presented by Sheppard was attached to a lock with the same Kryptonite logo as is advertised on the Columbia site.
‘Mastermind behind the scenes’
The NYPD’s Daughtry went on Newsmax (5/3/24) to hold up a copy of an Oxford University Press book as evidence that an unspecified “they” is “radicalizing our students.” Daughtry’s copy appears to be a facsimile; the actual book is four inches by six inches (Screengrab: Independent, 5/4/24).
Two days after Adams and Sheppard appeared on Morning Joe, Daughtry tweeted photos of items he said were found inside Hamilton Hall after the arrests, writing:
Gas masks, ear plugs, helmets, goggles, tape, hammers, knives, ropes and a book on TERRORISM. These are not the tools of students protesting, these are the tools of agitators, of people who were working on something nefarious.
That same day, Daughtry went on Newsmax (5/3/24; Independent, 5/4/24) and held up the cover of the book in question, Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction. “There is somebody—whether it’s paid or not paid—but they are radicalizing our students,” he declared. Police, he said, were investigating the “mastermind behind the scenes.” Right-wing news organizations like the National Desk (5/3/24) and the Center Square (5/6/24) immediately picked up on the report of the “disturbing” items, without speaking to either protestors or university officials.
The Terrorism book, it turned out, was part of an Oxford University Press series of short books—think “For Dummies,” but with a more academic bent—that was carried by Columbia itself at its libraries (Daily News, 5/4/24). Its author, leading British historian Charles Townshend, told the Daily News that he was disappointed the NYPD was implying that “people should not write about the subject at all.” The Independent (5/4/24) quoted a tweet from Timothy Kaldes, the deputy director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy: “How do you think we train professionals to work on these issues? No one at NYPD has books on terrorism? You all just study Die Hard?”
Media covering campus protests in the rest of the US similarly relied heavily on “police said” reporting, especially in the wake of the arrests of student protestors. CNN was an especially frequent perpetrator: Its report on mass arrests of protestors at Indiana University (4/25/24) ran online with the headline “At Least 33 People Detained on Indiana University’s Campus During Protests, Police Say,” and led with a police statement that students had been warned “numerous times” to leave their encampment, with the network stating blandly that “individuals who refused were detained and removed from the area.” Students later told reporters that they had been hit, kicked and placed in chokeholds by police during their arrests, and an Indiana State Police official confirmed that one officer had been placed on a rooftop with a sniper rifle (WFIU, 4/29/24).
The following week, CNN (5/1/24) reported on “violent clashes ongoing at UCLA” by citing a tweet from the Los Angeles Police Department that “due to multiple acts of violence,” police were responding “to restore order.” In fact, the incident turned out to be an attack by a violent pro-Israel mob on the student encampment (LA Times, 5/1/24). News outlets have a history of using terms like “clashes” to blur who instigated violence, whether by right-wingers or by the police themselves.
‘”Police said” not shorthand for truth’
Student journalists have largely been able to cover the encampments without relying on police forces to tell them what reality is (New York Focus, 5/2/24).
Law enforcement agencies, it’s been clear for decades, are unreliable narrators: It’s why journalism groups like Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation (10/27/22) have called for news outlets to stop treating police statements as “neutral sources of information.”
Following the murder of George Floyd, the Washington Post (6/30/20) wrote that “with fewer reporters handling more stories, the reliance on official sourcing may be increasing.” It quoted Marshall Project editor-in-chief Susan Chira as saying that police should be treated with “the same degree of skepticism as you treat any other source…. ‘Police said’ is not a shorthand for truth.”
There are, in fact, plenty of ways to report on the arrests of protestors without relying on the word of police officials: The Columbia Spectator (5/4/24), the Columbia radio station WKCR-FM and Columbia Journalism School students (New York Focus, 5/2/24) all contributed reporting that ran rings around the officially sourced segments that dominated the professional news media, despite a campus lockdown that at times left them unable to leave classroom buildings to witness events firsthand.
They found that Columbia protestors who occupied Hamilton Hall—described by Fox News (4/30/24) as a “mob of anarchists” — had in fact been organized and nonviolent: “It was very intentional and purposeful, and even what was damaged, like the windows, was all out of functionality,” one photographer eyewitness told the Spectator, describing students telling facilities workers, “Please, we need you to leave. You don’t get paid enough to deal with this.’
Sueda Polat, a Columbia graduate student, told the Spectator:
One officer had the nerve to say, “We’re here to keep you safe.” Moments later, they threw our friends down the stairs. I have images of our friends bleeding. I’ve talked to friends who couldn’t breathe, who were body-slammed, people who were unconscious. That’s keeping us safe?
It was a stark contrast with what cable TV viewers saw on MSNBC, where, as Adams and Sheppard wrapped up their Morning Joe segment, Brzezinski thanked them for joining the program, adding, “We really appreciate everything you’re doing.”
That’s no wonder: If you only talk to one side in a dispute, you’re more likely to end up concluding that they’re the heroes.
During the summer of protests that followed the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd in May 2020, journalists and readers alike began taking a hard look at how much news reporting relied on police sources. In particular, the standard use of “police said” articles—where the main or only source of information came from law enforcement—was leading the media to publish information that was outright wrong.
Journalists learned some lessons from the Black Lives Matter protests (Washington Post, 6/30/20)—and promptly forgot them.
In their first media statement on Floyd’s death, Minneapolis police claimed that officers had observed Floyd “suffering medical distress and called for an ambulance”; it was only when cellphone video emerged that it was reported that police were in fact kneeling on Floyd’s neck at the time (NBC News, 5/26/20). To many, it was all too familiar a pattern: Five years earlier, the Baltimore Sun (4/24/15) had based its reporting on the police killing of Freddie Gray almost entirely on official police statements, downplaying eyewitness reports that officers had thrown Gray headfirst into a van shortly before he died of neck injuries.
“What the police tell you initially is a rumor,” Mel Reeves, an editor at the then-86-year-old African-American newspaper the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder told the Washington Post (6/30/20). “And a lot of the times it’s not accurate.” CNN (6/6/20), in a report on how camera footage often ended up disproving police claims, went further: “Videos from several recent incidents, and countless others from over the years, have shown what many Black Americans have long maintained: that police officers lie.”
Yet four years later, when protests broke out on college campuses calling for universities to divest from companies that support the Israeli government’s campaign of killing civilians in Gaza, US media forgot those lessons—and ended up repeatedly misinforming readers as a result.
‘Trying to radicalize our children’
Nahla Al-Arian could more accurately described as a retired elementary teacher visiting the campus that her journalist daughter graduated from.
The morning after the New York Police Department arrested 282 people at Columbia University and the City College of New York during protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, MSNBC’s Morning Joe (5/1/24) welcomed New York City Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD deputy commissioner of public information Tarik Sheppard as its sole guests. “At what point was it known to you that this was something more [than students] and that there were people who maybe had plans for worse than what some of the students were up to?” MSNBC anchor Willie Geist asked Adams. The mayor replied:
We were able to actually confirm that with our intelligence division and one of the individual’s husband was arrested for and convicted for terrorism on a federal level…. These were professionals that were here. I just want to send a clear message out that there are people who are harmful and are trying to radicalize our children.
Co-anchor Mika Brzezinski nodded in approval. When Adams added, “I don’t know if they’re international, we need to look into that as well,” Brzezinski softly said, “Yes.”
The story of the terrorist’s wife had first been put forward by city officials the previous evening, when CBS New York reporter Ali Bauman posted on Twitter, now rebranded as X (4/30/24; since deleted, but widely screenshotted), that “City Hall sources tell @CBSNewYork evidence that the wife of a known terrorist is with protestors on Columbia University campus.” At 1:47 am, CNN (5/1/24) issued a “breaking news” alert identifying the couple, Nahla and Sami Al-Arian, and showing a photo of Nahla on campus that Sami had posted to Twitter.
The next morning, Jake Offenhartz of the Associated Press (5/1/24) tracked down this “professional” agitator: Nahla Al-Arian was a retired elementary school teacher, and Sami a former computer engineering professor at the University of South Florida. He had been arrested in 2003 at the behest of then–US Attorney General John Ashcroft and charged with supporting the group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. After spending two years in jail awaiting trial, he was acquitted on all but one charge (a jury was deadlocked on the remaining count), and eventually agreed to a plea deal in which he and his wife moved to Turkey.
Nahla Al-Arian had visited the protests a week earlier with her daughters, both TV journalists, one a Columbia Journalism School graduate. Nahla stayed for about an hour, she told the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill (5/3/24), listening to part of a teach-in and sharing some hummus with students, then returned to Virginia, where she was visiting her grandchildren, when Columbia students occupied a university building and police moved in to make arrests.
‘Look at the tents’
“Look at the tents,” NYPD official Kaz Daughtry told Fox 5 (4/23/24). “They all were the same color, the same ones that we saw at NYU, the same ones that we see at Columbia.”
This wasn’t the first time the NYPD had alleged that outsiders were behind the campus protests. A week earlier, after the Columbia encampment had resulted in an earlier round of arrests at the behest of university president Minouche Shafik, Fox 5 Good Day New York (4/23/24) brought on Sheppard and NYPD Commissioner of Operations Kaz Daughtry as its guests. “The mayor is describing some of the people there as professional agitators,” said anchor Rosanna Scotto. “Are these just students?”
“Look at the tents,” replied Daughtry. “They all were the same color, the same ones that we saw at NYU, the same ones that we see at Columbia. To me, I think someone is funding this.”
After an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (4/24/24) asserted that “Rockefeller and Soros grants are subsidizing those who disrupt college campuses”— actually, one protestor at Yale and one at the University of California, Berkeley, were former fellows at a nonprofit funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund—the New York Post (4/26/24) wrote that “copycat tent cities have been set up at colleges including Harvard, Yale, Berkeley in California, the Ohio State University and Emory in Georgia—all of them organized by branches of the Soros-funded Students for Justice in Palestine.”
At the same time, as Wired (4/25/24) reported, dozens of Facebook and Twitter accounts had posted identical messages about the tents, saying: “Almost all the tents are identical—same design, same size, same fresh-out-of-the-box appearance. I know that college students are not that rich or coordinated.”
Snopes (4/29/24) later investigated the Post’s claims, and found no evidence that Soros had funded Students for Justice in Palestine. Meanwhile, Hell Gate (4/24/24) had checked Daughtry’s theory of a secret tent-funder through advanced data gathering: They googled it. As it turned out, there was a simpler explanation for why students across the city were using similar tents—they were the cheapest ones available online, for as little as $15. “My God,” reported the news site, “looks like what we’ve got on our hands is a classic case of college students buying something cheap and disposable.”
‘This is what professionals bring’
NYPD’s Tarik Sheppard presented as evidence of “outside agitators” a bike lock with the same Kryptonite logo as the locks sold by Columbia (photo: Christopher Robbins/Hell Gate).
The same Morning Joe appearance by Adams and Sheppard introduced another household item that, police claimed, was a clear sign of outsiders being behind the protests. “You brought in a pretty staggering visual,” Brzezinski said to Sheppard. After he spoke about how “outside agitators” wanted to “create discord,” she prodded him, “Tell us about this chain.”
Sheppard lifted up a heavy metal chain, which clattered noisily against his desk. “This is not what students bring to school,” he declared. (“Don’t think so!” replied Brzezinski.) “This is what professionals bring to campuses and universities…. And this is what we encountered on every door inside of Hamilton Hall.”
That night, Fox News (5/1/24) ran the clip of Sheppard brandishing the chain, with anchor Sean Hannity calling the situation “a recipe for disaster.” The New York Daily News (5/1/24) quoted Sheppard’s “not what students bring to school” statement as well, without any attempt to check its accuracy.
Almost immediately, the “professional” chain story began to unravel. Less than 20 minutes after the Morning Joe segment, New York Times visual investigations reporter Aric Toler (5/1/24) tweeted that the exact same chain was not only used by Columbia students, it was in fact sold by the university’s own public safety department, under its “Crime Prevention Discount Bike, Locker and Laptop Lock Program.” At an NYPD press conference later that morning, The City reporter Katie Honan then showed the school’s listing to Sheppard, who insisted, “This is not the chain.”
Toler later tweeted a photo comparing the two, which appeared almost identical. Hell Gate editor Christopher Robbins, who was at the press conference, provided FAIR with a still frame from a video showing that the chain presented by Sheppard was attached to a lock with the same Kryptonite logo as is advertised on the Columbia site.
‘Mastermind behind the scenes’
The NYPD’s Daughtry went on Newsmax (5/3/24) to hold up a copy of an Oxford University Press book as evidence that an unspecified “they” is “radicalizing our students.” Daughtry’s copy appears to be a facsimile; the actual book is four inches by six inches (Screengrab: Independent, 5/4/24).
Two days after Adams and Sheppard appeared on Morning Joe, Daughtry tweeted photos of items he said were found inside Hamilton Hall after the arrests, writing:
Gas masks, ear plugs, helmets, goggles, tape, hammers, knives, ropes and a book on TERRORISM. These are not the tools of students protesting, these are the tools of agitators, of people who were working on something nefarious.
That same day, Daughtry went on Newsmax (5/3/24; Independent, 5/4/24) and held up the cover of the book in question, Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction. “There is somebody—whether it’s paid or not paid—but they are radicalizing our students,” he declared. Police, he said, were investigating the “mastermind behind the scenes.” Right-wing news organizations like the National Desk (5/3/24) and the Center Square (5/6/24) immediately picked up on the report of the “disturbing” items, without speaking to either protestors or university officials.
The Terrorism book, it turned out, was part of an Oxford University Press series of short books—think “For Dummies,” but with a more academic bent—that was carried by Columbia itself at its libraries (Daily News, 5/4/24). Its author, leading British historian Charles Townshend, told the Daily News that he was disappointed the NYPD was implying that “people should not write about the subject at all.” The Independent (5/4/24) quoted a tweet from Timothy Kaldes, the deputy director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy: “How do you think we train professionals to work on these issues? No one at NYPD has books on terrorism? You all just study Die Hard?”
Media covering campus protests in the rest of the US similarly relied heavily on “police said” reporting, especially in the wake of the arrests of student protestors. CNN was an especially frequent perpetrator: Its report on mass arrests of protestors at Indiana University (4/25/24) ran online with the headline “At Least 33 People Detained on Indiana University’s Campus During Protests, Police Say,” and led with a police statement that students had been warned “numerous times” to leave their encampment, with the network stating blandly that “individuals who refused were detained and removed from the area.” Students later told reporters that they had been hit, kicked and placed in chokeholds by police during their arrests, and an Indiana State Police official confirmed that one officer had been placed on a rooftop with a sniper rifle (WFIU, 4/29/24).
The following week, CNN (5/1/24) reported on “violent clashes ongoing at UCLA” by citing a tweet from the Los Angeles Police Department that “due to multiple acts of violence,” police were responding “to restore order.” In fact, the incident turned out to be an attack by a violent pro-Israel mob on the student encampment (LA Times, 5/1/24). News outlets have a history of using terms like “clashes” to blur who instigated violence, whether by right-wingers or by the police themselves.
‘”Police said” not shorthand for truth’
Student journalists have largely been able to cover the encampments without relying on police forces to tell them what reality is (New York Focus, 5/2/24).
Law enforcement agencies, it’s been clear for decades, are unreliable narrators: It’s why journalism groups like Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation (10/27/22) have called for news outlets to stop treating police statements as “neutral sources of information.”
Following the murder of George Floyd, the Washington Post (6/30/20) wrote that “with fewer reporters handling more stories, the reliance on official sourcing may be increasing.” It quoted Marshall Project editor-in-chief Susan Chira as saying that police should be treated with “the same degree of skepticism as you treat any other source…. ‘Police said’ is not a shorthand for truth.”
There are, in fact, plenty of ways to report on the arrests of protestors without relying on the word of police officials: The Columbia Spectator (5/4/24), the Columbia radio station WKCR-FM and Columbia Journalism School students (New York Focus, 5/2/24) all contributed reporting that ran rings around the officially sourced segments that dominated the professional news media, despite a campus lockdown that at times left them unable to leave classroom buildings to witness events firsthand.
They found that Columbia protestors who occupied Hamilton Hall—described by Fox News (4/30/24) as a “mob of anarchists” — had in fact been organized and nonviolent: “It was very intentional and purposeful, and even what was damaged, like the windows, was all out of functionality,” one photographer eyewitness told the Spectator, describing students telling facilities workers, “Please, we need you to leave. You don’t get paid enough to deal with this.’
Sueda Polat, a Columbia graduate student, told the Spectator:
One officer had the nerve to say, “We’re here to keep you safe.” Moments later, they threw our friends down the stairs. I have images of our friends bleeding. I’ve talked to friends who couldn’t breathe, who were body-slammed, people who were unconscious. That’s keeping us safe?
It was a stark contrast with what cable TV viewers saw on MSNBC, where, as Adams and Sheppard wrapped up their Morning Joe segment, Brzezinski thanked them for joining the program, adding, “We really appreciate everything you’re doing.”
That’s no wonder: If you only talk to one side in a dispute, you’re more likely to end up concluding that they’re the heroes.
As US lawmakers’ agitation over TikTok culminates in a law that threatens a nationwide ban if the social media platform isn’t sold to a US buyer within nine months, an emergent media narrative finds a silver lining. Every legislative move targeting TikTok, the story goes, has the potential to inspire much-needed regulation of tech behemoths like Meta, Amazon, Google and Apple.
But by conflating the US’s legal treatment of TikTok—a subsidiary of the Beijing-basedByteDance—with that of its own tech industry, media obscure the real reasons for the law’s passage.
False comparisons
Did the TikTok law really break the “tech law logjam,” as the headline (New York Times, 4/25/24) asserts? Probably not, the story acknowledges.
This was apparent in a New York Times piece (4/25/24) headlined “TikTok Broke the Tech Law Logjam. Can That Success Be Repeated?” Author Cecilia Kang described the recently instated divest-or-ban law—passed as part of a package with aid to Israel and Ukraine—as an instance of “reining in the tech giants.” The article suggested that the ban might be a harbinger of broader regulation of the tech industry in the public interest, such as antitrust legislation or mental-health guardrails.
Kang cited multiple sources who doubted that the ultimatum would spur regulation of US tech companies, arguing that lawmakers influenced by industry lobbying and 2024 campaign strategies would balk at the notion of curtailing US corporate power.
It’s fair to note that the TikTok law was unlikely to have this effect. But lobbying and campaigning aren’t the only, or even the primary, explanations for this. A simple review of the legislation shows that it’s not a form of good-faith regulation meant to protect the populace, but an effort to either seize or severely weaken TikTok in the name of US interests.
Kang’s thesis was premised on years’ worth of media and policymaker fearmongering that TikTok user data was susceptible to surveillance by the Chinese government (BuzzFeed News, 6/17/22; Forbes, 10/20/22; Guardian, 11/7/22). According to Kang’s colleagues, the law’s enactment was prompted by “concerns that the Chinese government could access sensitive user data” (New York Times, 4/26/24). In 2023, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte sought to prohibit TikTok throughout his state on the grounds that “the Chinese Communist Party” was “collecting US users’ personal, private and sensitive information” (Montana Free Press, 5/17/23). (Gianforte’s attempt was later thwarted by a federal judge.)
If such fears were officials’ genuine motivation, one could hope that broader data-privacy regulation might follow. Yet, as the Times neglected to mention, the spying accusations are tenuous—and deeply cynical. As even US intelligence officials concede, apprehensions about China’s access to TikTok user data are strictly hypothetical (Intercept, 3/16/24). And, despite its bombshell headline “Analysis: There Is Now Some Public Evidence That China Viewed TikTok Data,” CNN (6/8/23) cautioned that said evidence—a sworn statement from a former ByteDance employee—“remains rather thin.”
Pretext for censorship
Mitt Romney on Gaza (Common Dreams, 5/6/24): “The way this has played out on social media…has a very, very challenging effect on the narrative.”
Given their dubious nature, it’s hard to see these data-privacy claims as anything other than a pretext for the US to throttle TikTok. By forcing either divestment or a ban, the US, at least in theory, wins: It transfers a tremendously lucrative and influential company into its own hands, or it prevents that company from serving as a platform—albeit one with plenty of problems—on which people can engage in and learn from discourses that are critical of US empire.
The censorial intentions of the legislation have been thrown into sharp relief by congressional Republicans. In an address on April 24, the day President Joe Biden made the ultimatum law, Sen. Pete Ricketts (R–Neb.) fretted that “nearly a third” of users between the ages of 18 and 29 used TikTok as a regular news source. (Results from a November 2023 Pew survey confirm this.) This was cause for alarm, according to the senator, because the platform featured a heightened concentration of “pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas” videos as part of a dastardly plot by the Chinese government.
Senator and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney (R–Utah) reinforced Ricketts’ fearmongering in early May, asserting at a forum with Secretary of State Antony Blinken that “the number of mentions of Palestinians” on TikTok generated “overwhelming support to shut [TikTok] down” (Common Dreams, 5/6/24). Romney’s source for this wasn’t clear, but his message was: TikTok simply wouldn’t be tolerated as a source of information that contradicted official narratives.
Likewise, Rep. Mike Lawler (R–NY) (Intercept, 5/4/24) told the centrist advocacy group No Labels that the Gaza protests are
exactly why we included the TikTok bill in the foreign supplemental aid package, because you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the US.
With “a big bipartisan push in both chambers to crack down on TikTok,” NBC (4/16/23) sees “a window of opportunity to pass new regulations in…the tech industry.”
The right-wing lawmakers were far from the first to harbor this sentiment; criticisms like this had been simmering for months (FAIR.org, 11/13/23, 3/14/24). (These admissions that Congress went after TikTok based on its content will likely help the lawsuit ByteDance filed arguing that the law mandating either a sale or a ban is unconstitutional—Hollywood Reporter, 5/7/24).
Ignoring this context, Associated Press (3/24/24) presented the same inaccurate characterizations as the New York Times. Paraphrasing Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), AP reported that the TikTok law—which, at the time, was merely a bill the House had passed—“is the best chance to get something done after years of inaction” on tech regulation. The moral content of what, exactly, was being done didn’t seem to matter to the news agency. Instead, AP opted to uncritically publish Warner’s insinuation that young TikTok users urging their congressional representatives to vote against the ban were “manipulated” by the “Communist Party of China.”
AP’s report echoed an equally faulty NBC News summary (4/16/23) of congressional approaches to the tech industry. Though the story was published prior to any TikTok legislation, it remarked on a “big bipartisan push” to “crack down” on the company. The piece went on to group what was then a more abstract—but thoroughly jingoistic—movement against TikTok with regulation regarding such unrelated user-protection concerns as “deep fakes, voice phishing scams and powerful chatbots like Chat GPT.”
Domestic rewards
Facebook parent Meta paid a consulting firm to get out the message that “TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using” (Washington Post, 3/30/22).
Absent from these reports is yet another reason a ban or forced sale of TikTok won’t necessarily lead to domestic regulation: US tech giants stand to benefit from the law. As the New York Times itself (4/24/24) reports, “Meta could draw up to 60% of TikTok’s American ad revenue, while YouTube could take another 25% or so.” Not coincidentally, at least one US tech firm was involved in manufacturing public antipathy toward TikTok: According to the Washington Post (3/30/22), Meta, a directTikTok competitor, paid a Republican consulting firm to orchestrate a smear campaign against TikTok. The effort included planted op-eds and letters to the editor in “major regional news outlets” nationwide.
Coupling this information with the US’s historical refusal to regulate its own tech industry, why, one might wonder, would the US suddenly change course? And wouldn’t this mean that a US-owned TikTok would operate effectively unchecked, just like current US tech corporations?
But such questions aren’t meant to be asked in a narrative that launders reactionary policymaking as a potential regulatory boon. The TikTok ultimatum, we’re told, isn’t a drastic measure to stifle statements of support for Palestine or any other political speech to the left of the State Department line; it’s, to borrow from the New York Times (4/25/24), a “success.”
Featured image: Detail from BreakThrough News video on TikTok (10/28/23) about a pro-Palestine march in Dallas—the kind of content a new law is aimed at suppressing.
An emerging complaint the corporate media have against the nationwide—and now international—peace encampments is that many student protesters won’t speak to them. The problem, pundits and reporters say, is that these encampments have designated media spokespeople, and other protesters often keep their mouths shut to the press.
Peggy Noonan (Wall Street Journal, 5/2/24), based, apparently, on talking to no protesters, concluded that “they weren’t a compassionate group. They weren’t for anything, they were against something: the Israeli state, which they’d like to see disappear, and those who support it.”
Conservative pundit Peggy Noonan (Wall Street Journal, 5/2/24) said of her trip to the Columbia University encampment:
I was at Columbia hours before the police came in and liberated Hamilton Hall from its occupiers. Unlike protesters of the past, who were usually eager to share with others what they thought and why, these demonstrators would generally not speak or make eye contact with members of the press, or, as they say, “corporate media.”
I was on a bench taking notes as a group of young women, all in sunglasses, masks and kaffiyehs, walked by. “Friends, please come say hello and tell me what you think,” I called. They marched past, not making eye contact, save one, a beautiful girl of about 20. “I’m not trained,” she said. Which is what they’re instructed to say to corporate-media representatives who will twist your words. “I’m barely trained, you’re safe,” I called, and she laughed and half-halted. But her friends gave her a look and she conformed.
Peter Baker (Twitter, 5/4/24), the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, supportively amplified the former Ronald Reagan speechwriter’s claim, saying the protests are “not about actually explaining your cause or trying to engage journalists who are there to listen.”
A reporter for KTLA (4/29/24) complained that his news team was not granted access to the encampment at UCLA, and Fox News (4/30/24) had a similar complaint about the New York University protest:
Fox News Digital was told that the outlet was not allowed inside, and only student press could access the gated lawn. A local ABC team and several independent reporters were also denied. However, Fox News Digital witnessed a documentary crew and a reporter from Al Jazeera reporting inside the area.
One has to wonder: What could make activists suspect that the network that produced “Anti-Israel Agitators: Signs of ‘Foreign Assistance’ Emerge in Columbia, NYU Unrest” (4/26/24), “Pressure Builds for Colleges to Close or Shut Down Anti-Israel Encampments Amid Death Threats Toward Jews” (4/26/24) and “Ivy League Anti-Israel Agitators’ Protests Spiral Into ‘Actual Terror Organization,’ Professor Warns” (4/21/24) wouldn’t give them a fair shake?
Organized structure
A New York Times news report (5/2/24) ties protests to the US’s official enemies, despite “little evidence—at least so far—that the countries have provided material or organizational support to the protests.”
What is clear is that the student protesters across the country have organized a structure where many participants who are approached by media defer to appointed media liaisons (Daily Bruin, 4/27/24; KSBW, 5/3/24; Daily Freeman, 5/4/24; WCOS, 5/4/24).
For Baker and Noonan, this is evidence that the protests are at best not serious, and at worst not democratic. Indeed, corporate media, at every turn, have attempted to sully calls to halt a genocide as some kind of perverted anti-democratic extremism (Atlantic, 4/22/24; New York Times, 4/23/24, 5/2/24; Washington Post, 5/6/24, 5/6/24; Free Press, 5/6/24).
But why would such a communications structure even be considered unusual? Most organizations that corporate journalists cover have dedicated spokespeople to handle media inquiries, while others stay silent. Noonan’s experience is no different than how many street reporters interact with the cops; ask a cop for a comment and you’ll get sent over to the public information officer. You’ll rarely if ever see a news story that complains or even notes that a government or corporate employee directed a reporter to talk to the press office.
It’s true that in the worlds of business and bureaucracy, restrictions on employee speech can hamper investigative reporting (FAIR.org, 2/23/24). But the media discipline at these encampments seems more like a way to keep the message clear. Vox-pop free-for-alls at these encampments could make it harder for news consumers to figure out what the protests are about; the demands and the aims of the movement might be muddled if every participant sounded off into the nearest reporter’s microphone.
With the current media strategy, Baker and Noonan really don’t have to wonder what the messages are: The encampments want their campuses to divest from Israel, and now students are protesting their administrations and the police violence against free speech and assembly. They are not entitled to the time of every individual protester.
It’s also all too easy for corporate reporters or right-wing commentators to find one loose cannon at a protest who can be prompted to go off-message during an interview, giving media outlets the ability to paint protesters generally as unhinged and ignorant. The fact that the Gaza encampment protesters have such a structure in place is a sign of political maturity, because they have found a way to keep the message simple and unified.
“The college kids are showing a precocious message discipline to reporters hostile to the substance of their protest,” Chase Madar, a New York University adjunct instructor, told FAIR.
Insinuating illiberalism
Baker and Noonan don’t express alarm that student reporters covering the protests have been subjected to extreme violence by the police (CNN, 5/2/24, 5/2/24), a very real form of state censorship. Nevertheless, Noonan and Baker insinuate that an aversion to speak to the corporate press signifies the movement’s illiberalism.
Perhaps establishment media are a little bitter that student reporters at places like Columbia University’s WKCR are doing a better job of covering the unrest than some salaried professionals in the media class (AP, 5/3/24; Washington Post, 5/4/24; Axios, 5/4/24).
If anything, what Baker and Noonan are lamenting is that the discipline of the students is making it harder for corporate media to misrepresent, ridicule and embarrass students who are protesting the US-backed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. They’re telling on themselves.
Featured image: Fox News depiction (4/30/24) of the Columbia University encampment it complained it had been shut out of.
As peace activists occupied common spaces on campuses across the country, some in corporate media very clearly took sides, portraying student protesters as violent, hateful and/or stupid. CNN offered some of the most striking of these characterizations.
CNN‘s Dana Bash (Inside Politics, 5/1/24) blames the peace movement for “destruction, violence and hate on college campuses across the country.”
Dana Bash (Inside Politics, 5/1/24) stared gravely into the camera and launched into a segment on “destruction, violence and hate on college campuses across the country.” Her voice dripping with hostility toward the protests, she reported:
Many of these protests started peacefully with legitimate questions about the war, but in many cases, they lost the plot. They’re calling for a ceasefire. Well, there was a ceasefire on October 6, the day before Hamas terrorists brutally murdered more than a thousand people inside Israel and took hundreds more as hostages. This hour, I’ll speak to an American Israeli family whose son is still held captive by Hamas since that horrifying day, that brought us to this moment. You don’t hear the pro-Palestinian protesters talking about that. We will.
By Bash’s logic, once a ceasefire is broken, no one can ever call for it to be reinstated—even as the death toll in Gaza nears 35,000. But her claim that there was a ceasefire until Hamas broke it on October 7 is little more than Israeli propaganda: Hundreds of Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the year preceding October 7 (FAIR.org, 7/6/23).
‘Hearkening back to 1930s Europe’
“They didn’t let me get to class using the main entrance!” complains Eli Tsives in one of several videos he posted of confrontations with anti-war demonstrators. “Instead they forced me to walk around. Shame on these people!”
Bash continued:
Now protesting the way the Israeli government, the Israeli prime minister, is prosecuting the retaliatory war against Hamas is one thing. Making Jewish students feel unsafe at their own schools is unacceptable, and it is happening way too much right now.
As evidence of this lack of safety, Bash pointed to UCLA student Eli Tsives, who posted a video of himself confronting motionless antiwar protesters physically standing in his way on campus. “This is our school, and they’re not letting me walk in,” he claims in the clip. Bash ominously described this as “hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe.”
Bash was presumably referring to the rise of the Nazis and their increasing restrictions on Jews prior to World War II. But while Tsives’ clip suggests protesters are keeping him off UCLA campus, they’re in fact blocking him from their encampment—where many Jewish students were present. (Jewish Voice for Peace is one of its lead groups.)
So it’s clearly not Tsives’ Jewishness that the protesters object to. But Tsives was not just any Jewish student; a UCLA drama student and former intern at the pro-Israel group Stand With Us, he had been a visible face of the counter-protests, repeatedly posting videos of himself confronting peaceful antiwar protesters. He has shown up to the encampment wearing a holster of pepper spray.
One earlier video he made showing himself being denied entry to the encampment included text on screen claiming misleadingly that protestors objected to his Jewishness: “They prevented us, Jewish students, from entering public land!” (“You can kiss your jobs goodbye, this is going to go viral on social media,” he tells the protesters.) He also proudly posted his multiple interviews on Fox News, which was as eager as Bash to help him promote his false narrative of antisemitism.
‘Attacking each other’
“Security and [campus police] both retreated as pro-Israel counter-protesters and other groups attacked protesters in the encampment,” UCLA’s student paper (Daily Bruin, 5/1/24) reported.
UCLA protesters had good reason to keep counter-protesters out of their encampment, as those counter-protesters had become increasingly hostile (Forward, 5/1/24; New York Times, 4/30/24). This aggression culminated in a violent attack on the encampment on April 30 (Daily Bruin, 5/1/24).
Late that night, a pro-Israel mob of at least 200 tried to storm the student encampment, punching, kicking, throwing bricks and other objects, spraying pepper spray and mace, trying to tear down plywood barricades and launching fireworks into the crowd. As many as 25 injuries have been reported, including four student journalists for the university newspaper who were assaulted by goons as they attempted to leave the scene (Forward, 5/2/24; Democracy Now!, 5/2/24).
Campus security stood by as the attacks went on; when the university finally called in police support, the officers who arrived waited over an hour to intervene (LA Times, 5/1/24).
(The police were less reticent in clearing out the encampment a day later at UCLA’s request. Reporters on the scene described police in riot gear firing rubber bullets at close range and “several instances of protesters being injured”—LA Times, 5/3/24.)
The mob attacks at UCLA, along with police use of force at that campus and elsewhere, clearly represent the most “destruction, violence and hate” at the encampments, which have been overwhelmingly peaceful. But Bash’s description of the UCLA violence rewrote the narrative to fit her own agenda: “Pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups were attacking each other, hurling all kinds of objects, a wood pallet, fireworks, parking cones, even a scooter.”
When CNN correspondent Stephanie Elam reported, later in the same segment, that the UCLA violence came from counter-protesters, Bash’s response was not to correct her own earlier misrepresentation, but to disparage antiwar protesters: Bash commended the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles for saying the violence does not represent the Jewish community, and snidely commented: “Be nice to see that on all sides of this.”
‘Violence erupted’
“For me, never again is never again for anyone,” says a Jewish participant in the UCLA encampment (Instagram, 5/2/24).
Bash wasn’t the only one at CNN framing antiwar protesters as the violent ones, against all evidence. Correspondent Camila Bernal (5/2/24) reported on the UCLA encampment:
The mostly peaceful encampment was set up a week ago, but violence erupted during counter protest on Sunday, and even more tense moments overnight Tuesday, leaving at least 15 injured. Last night, protesters attempted to stand their ground, linking arms, using flashlights on officers’ faces, shouting and even throwing items at officers. But despite what CHP described as a dangerous operation, an almost one-to-one ratio officers to protesters gave authorities the upper hand.
Who was injured? Who was violent? Bernal left that to viewers’ imagination. She did mention that officers used “what appeared to be rubber bullets,” but the only participant given camera time was a police officer accusing antiwar students of throwing things at police.
Earlier CNN reporting (5/1/24) from UCLA referred to “dueling protests between pro-Palestinian demonstrators and those supporting Jewish students.” It’s a false dichotomy, as many of the antiwar protesters are themselves Jewish, and eyewitness reports suggested that many in the mob were not students and not representative of the Jewish community (Times of Israel, 5/2/24).
CNN likewise highlighted the law and order perspective after Columbia’s president called in the NYPD to respond to the student takeover of Hamilton Hall. CNNNewsroom (5/1/24) brought on a retired FBI agent to analyze the police operation. His praise was unsurprising:
It was impressive. It was surprisingly smooth…. The beauty of America is that we can say things, we can protest, we can do this publicly, even when it’s offensive language. But you can’t trespass and keep people from being able to go to class and going to their graduations. We draw a line between that and, you know, civil control.
CNN host Jake Tapper (4/29/24) criticized the Columbia president’s approach to the protests—for being too lenient: “I mean, a college president’s not a diplomat. A college president’s an authoritarian, really.” (More than a week earlier, president Minouche Shafik had had more than a hundred students arrested for camping overnight on a lawn—FAIR.org, 4/19/24.)
‘Taking room from my show’
“The majority of news since the war began…has been skewed by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel,” a CNN staffer told the Guardian (2/4/24).
Tapper did little to hide his utter contempt for the protesters. He complained:
This is taking room from my show that I would normally be spending covering what is going on in Gaza, or what is going on with the International Criminal Court, talking about maybe bringing charges. We were talking about the ceasefire deal. I mean, this—so I don’t know that the protesters, just from a media perspective, are accomplishing what they want to accomplish, because I’m actually covering the issue and the pain of the Palestinians and the pain of the Israelis—not that they’re protesting for that—less because of this.
It’s Tapper and CNN, of course, who decide what stories are most important and deserve coverage—not campus protesters. Some might say that that a break from CNN‘s regular coverage the Israel’s assault on Gaza would not altogether be a bad thing, as CNN staffers have complained of “regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian perspectives in the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza” (Guardian, 2/4/24)
The next day, Tapper’s framing of the protests made clear whose grievances he thought were the most worthy (4/30/24): “CNN continues to following the breaking news on college campuses where anti-Israel protests have disrupted academic life and learning across the United States.”
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Donald Trump is now the first former US president to be convicted of a felony, found guilty on 34 counts of “in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex” (AP, 
